Article K20 LAB1126 - Jump Start Your Performance Analytics Journey Session Q&A.

[Alexa Petersen]

This article is for questions and answers for LAB1126 - Jump Start Your Performance Analytics Journey. This lab is being presented multiple times throughout the live K20 event May 5 - 7, 2020. During the live event, post your questions in the comments of this article, and one of our lab gurus will be happy to answer it.

[Tricia Cornish]

Welcome Everyone,

I am Tricia Cornish from the Now Intelligence pre-sales team and excited to be co-presenting this course with my partner Amit Kumar from the Now Intelligence Product Management team. 

We're covering capabilities that facilitate better adoption of PA. Feel free to peruse the guidebook: https://developer.servicenow.com/connect.do#!/event/knowledge2020/LAB1126

As we go through the labs, please post your comments/questions here for the lab team to answer. 

See you there,

Tricia 

[That Phil Guy]

Hi, all! ^_^ 

Having difficulty finding the Service Portal Content Packs after activating the “4 hour” script for installing items from the ServiceNow store?

If you clicked the “Enable App Installation (4 hours)” module, you may wind up on the the sys_plugins table—a simple list of records. However, what you’re looking for is only available in the Plugins page (sounds like the same thing—but isn’t!). That’s because the Plugins page is integrated with the ServiceNow Store and therefore contains additional content.

So, just go to “Plugins” in the Application Navigator, and you should find what you’re looking for!

[Mille Lundfald]

It seems spotlights are always created for specific tables, and not on the task table, but is it possible to use spotlight on lists from the task table, so agents handling both incidents, requests etc. get a prioritized list sorted on the spotlight score across different task types?

[Ashby]

Yes......you can create a "Spotlight" on any table needed and set the weights are needed based upon Task type and any other attribute needed.  

[Todd Preece]

Theres nothing from preventing as defining an indicator source/record source as the task table but.... you'll run into issues there since many of the fields between tasks are different. e.g. incident states are different than change states etc. 

[Mille Lundfald]

I know, but what I was thinking was to set uo different spotlight on the specific tables, and then displaying the scores on the task table, so you get the different task types ranked among each other based on the score, but without the score being calculated the same way depending on the task type (not sure I can explain well enough, as English is my 2nd language)

[Mille Lundfald]

THe reason for this is, I have never seen a business where supporters does not handle both incidents and requests, and what they find very difficult is when to prioritize incidents over requests or vice verca

[hanshornstein]

Thank you to everyone who took part in Tuesday's lab session - we'll continue to monitor this thread for questions through the week. Enjoy the rest of your Digital K20 experience!

[hanshornstein]

Thank you to everyone who took part in Tuesday's lab session - we'll continue to monitor this thread for questions through the week. Enjoy the rest of your Digital K20 experience!

[Todd Preece]

Well your English is better than mine and it's my only language 😉

Understood about teams managing multiple task types. I had many lives where the "My tickets" view was far more in demand by users than "My incidents" or "My changes".

I haven't done what you are proposing but cant see a reason you could not do that, just may be a heavy lift and you may run into nuances in the ticket types that make it challenging.

[Mille Lundfald]

Thanks 🙂 

I'll just have to start trying different solutions out on my developer instance to see what is possible.

[That Phil Guy]

I wonder if using a Database View to join exactly the tables needed would be a possible solution? Just adding one more idea to the table.

[debsatka]

Elements Filters...will that require the paid version of PA or will we have that with the complimentary version?

[debsatka]

Also...this comes with Orlando correct? (I'm currently using New York and do not see it.)

[David de Beer]

I believe this is available in New York. Check out: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/newyork-performance-analytics-and-reporting/page/use/performance-...

[debsatka]

Thank you! Found it!

[David de Beer]

No problem!

[That Phil Guy]

Hello! I should also mention that Tricia brought up something that is new to Orlando: personalized Element Filters. Element Filters are a stalwart PA feature, but check out this documentation to see how the Orlando release has improved them. 🙂 

[Donna11]

I'm following along but my score widget for Expected Time to Close Incident shows no data available. I was also unable to add a new target using the right panel.

[kkswamy1]

Since which version, "Admin console" module is available for PA?

[kkswamy1]

diagnostics errors will also log in the "System Errors" module too? 

[Chris Zink]

Admin Console goes back at least as far as Kingston according to Docs.

[Ayca Oncu]

Hi, It's released on Kingston.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-release-notes/page/release-notes/performance-analytics-r...

[kkswamy1]

We always get the errors when we trying to migrate the dashboards from one instance to another using update sets?

What is the best practice to not get the errors to commit the update sets without errors?

[Alexis Hemled]

The Diagnostic Errors do not appear in the System log errors as they are stored in a Performance Analytics specific table (pa_diagnostic_result).

[Thomas_Davis]

Here is a ServiceNow Doc on moving Dashboards via Update Sets.
https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/orlando-performance-analytics-and-reporting/page/use/performance-...

Is this the way that you are currently doing it?

[That Phil Guy]

Also, a general thought for update sets:

Use things that illustrate relationships between components—such as the dependency assessment available in PA—whenever possible, because configuration often depends on many-to-many relationships (as seen in Related Lists). If you're trying to ensure you have everything you need in an Update Set, you'll need to capture things like child records and many-to-many records that kind of glue everything together. (If you're like me and sometimes get stuck trying to capture things after the fact, remembering to grab related records can be a challenge.)

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/orlando-performance-analytics-and-reporting/page/use/performance-... 

[That Phil Guy]

Nice catch, Alexis!

Not to suggest wanton customizations, but a BR written against the pa_diagnostic_result table could always send those results to the syslog table, too, if that were a stakeholder demand, right?

[That Phil Guy]

Got a nice question in the chat:

"Do we also have a feature to make these dashboards shared via e-mail and/or placing in an external source like Box?"

My response includes a bit of speculation, so please advise as needed!

Dashboards can be shared to ServiceNow users for live interaction—which is their strong point.

However, they can also be shared as static PDF through a scheduled share. One idea (which I have not yet tested) is to create a ServiceNow user or group whose email address is intended to be an inbound email address for your Box (as Box is seemingly able to receive inbound emails for file uploads). This would potentially (key word!) allow you to send Dashboards to Box as static PDFs via email.

[Alexis Hemled]

Yes it could, with a BR or a Flow. However I am not sure that this would really be helpful.

System Logs are generally reviewed in a timely manner and are used to review errors or warning that were generated automatically by the system, without any manual task from the administrator. So they are useful to detect potential issues.

Since the Diagnostics scripts in PA are executed by a manual task, the logical following step is to review those results. They are not generated automatically by the system based on a period so the review of the results will always be after executing the diagnostic, no?

So IMHO creating such a customization (even if simple) is not really necessary.

I would add that if the results were automatically generated, it would also be possible to create a report on the results "created on today" and create a periodic email that would only be sent if the list is not empty.

[Jessika Pettit]

I just completed the training but got lost in PA Configuration and now am unable to get through the guidebook. I do not have the highlighted option below.  Can someone help before the lab closes?

[Todd Preece]

As far as I can tell this has been a function since at least Kingston

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-performance-analytics-and-reporting/page/use/performance...

[Todd Preece]

This is partially an issue since update sets don't carry "data" so you end up with some items being captured and others not. Been there done that so I get it.

There's another process for dashboards so give this a shot.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/orlando-performance-analytics-and-reporting/page/use/performance-...

[Erich Zirnhelt]

FYI you can see all the available content packs on the docs site.

[Alexa Petersen]

If your lab link is not working for this lab today, please try this link:

https://developer.servicenow.com/connect.do#!/event/knowledge2020/LAB1126/lab_LAB1126_getting_immedi...

[Erich Zirnhelt]

There was a question in the session chat about stop word sharing for Text Analytics.

You can get details in the docs, but in short, stop words from global search are checked first by default.

[That Phil Guy]

Just in case anyone was curious about the underlying tables. All are in global scope.

ts_index_stop — stores table-based stop words

ts_stop — stores global stop words

pa_text_stop_words — stores stop words for Performance Analytics text analytics