Reporting incidents
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Summary of Reporting Incidents
ServiceNow enables service desk and IT managers to monitor and track incident status and service levels effectively through interactive dashboards and customizable reports. TheIncident > Overviewdashboard offers an at-a-glance view of open incidents, highlighting critical, unassigned, and overdue incidents with score widgets and grouping incidents by priority and state using charts. This dashboard is fully interactive and configurable to fit specific needs.
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Incident Reports
The platform provides a variety of base system incident reports that can be modified or extended. Users can find these reports by navigating to Reports > View / Run and searching for "incident." Key report types include:
- Basic bar or pie charts: Analyze incidents by assignment group, location, priority, or state to evaluate staffing and workload distribution.
- Time series reports: For example, Incident Trend by Configuration Item helps identify recurring problems related to specific assets.
- Multidimensional reports: Such as Incidents by Priority and State older than 30 Days, useful for spotting service level gaps, like unresolved low-priority incidents lingering in the system.
Incident Metrics
By activating the Metric Definition plugin (com.glide.metrics), ServiceNow customers can define and track key performance metrics for incident management. These metrics enable the service desk to generate reports and dashboards, automate report distribution, and refine operational rules including assignment, SLAs, and inactivity monitors. Leveraging metrics supports continuous improvement and helps reduce unnecessary incidents by encouraging knowledge base usage, assisted by related search results in the Incident form.
Performance Analytics for Incident Management
ServiceNow includes Complimentary Performance Analytics for Incident Management by default, providing an Incident Management dashboard with 15 key indicators to assess organizational performance over time. Customers with a Performance Analytics subscription gain additional benefits such as:
- In-form analytics integrated directly into Incident records for context-aware decision making.
- Preconfigured dashboards through Platform Analytics Solutions (legacy), offering actionable visualizations to enhance business processes and practices.
Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Quick visibility into incident workload and priorities for efficient resource allocation.
- Customizable reporting to analyze trends, identify bottlenecks, and improve service levels.
- Robust metrics to measure and optimize incident management processes.
- Enhanced analytics capabilities for data-driven insights directly within incident records and via dashboards.
- Tools to reduce incident volume by promoting knowledge base consultation before incident creation.
Service desk and other IT managers can use dashboards and reports to monitor and track incident status and service levels.
Incident Overview
The dashboard provides a quick glance at the current state of open incidents. At the top, single score widgets enumerate the open incident statuses, such as critical incidents, unassigned incidents, and overdue incidents. Charts in the dashboard group incidents by factors such as priority and state. The incident overview is fully interactive and configurable.
Incident reports
Various incident reports are available in the base system, and you can modify the existing reports or create new ones. Navigate to and enter incident in the search box to view all incident reports. Base system reports include the following:
- Basic bar or pie chart reports, such as incidents by assignment group, location, priority, or state. These reports help you analyze a specific data point, for example, whether enough staff is allocated to an assignment group.
- Time series reports, such as Incident Trend by Configuration Item. This report lets you analyze closed incidents by configuration item (CI) to identify potential problems.
- Multidimensional reports, such as Incidents by Priority and State older than 30 Days. This report can help you identify gaps in service levels. For example, if a high number of low-priority incidents are still in New state after being open more than 30 days.
Incident metric definition
A metric measures and evaluates the effectiveness of IT service management processes. The service desk can improve the incident management process using information gathered within the platform. You can activate the Metric Definition plugin (com.glide.metrics) and define the metrics to monitor within the system. With these metrics, and the information within the database, it is possible to generate reports that can be added to dashboards or automatically generated and distributed.
Using this information, it is possible to refine automatic rules such as the assignment rules, service level agreements, or inactivity monitors to better suit the unique environment of the service desk. Unnecessary incidents can be avoided by encouraging users to consult the knowledge base before creating an incident. The related search results function in the Incident form assists with this strategy.
Complimentary Performance Analytics for Incident Management
Complimentary Performance Analytics for Incident Management and aggregates data over time, and is enabled by default for Incident Management. Complimentary Performance Analytics for Incident Management provides an Incident Management dashboard with 15 indicators to help you assess organizational performance. For more information, see Performance Analytics for Incident Management.
A subscription to Performance Analytics also gives you access to In-form analytics. In-form analytics integrate performance insights into Incident records so that users can access important metrics in context and make better decisions.