User privacy, tracking, and user consent management in Usage Insights

Usage Insights relies on tracking user activity to measure the adoption, retention, and usage of KPIs to help you make better product and implementation decisions.

Tracking users in Usage Insights

Usage Insights can be used to track user behavior across Platform Analytics, Core UI, ServiceNow Mobile Platform, Service Portal, and the Conversational Analytics area of the Virtual Agent. Usage Insights used on web applications or mobile applications collects limited information, including; individually assigned UX analytics user ID, hashed system user ID, session start time and duration, and city-level location.

Tracking users in Usage Insights utilizes the user consent management (UCM) capability, enabling administrators to configure their analytics tracking preferences across all tracked applications. This capability provides the flexibility to customize the consent policy for each country and to select how the location of the user is detected.

Some of the options available to you with user consent management are:

• Applying different tracking consent policies to individual countries.
• Tracking specific users or tracking users with specific roles.
• Defining how to detect your users’ location.

Counters in the Usage Insights dashboard contain aggregated user numbers.

Note:

If the tracking consent policy named Disabled is selected, user metrics aren't tracked.

Figure 1. Usage Insights session view

• User tracking preferences for Usage Insights
  You can select to opt in or opt out of Usage Insights advanced tracking at any point.
• Enable or disable Usage Insights tracking
  You can turn off or turn on tracking for Platform Analytics, ServiceNow Mobile Platform, Service Portal, and the Conversational Analytics area of Virtual Agent by updating the Usage Insights settings.
• Types of tracking consent policies in Usage Insights
  There are five types of tracking consent policies that you can define for individual countries. This option provides you with the flexibility to define tracking policies according to the country and even according to users or roles.
• Define how to detect your user's location
  Detect your users by selecting and prioritizing a detection policy. You can also define the order in which these policies apply. There are predefined detection policies, but you can create custom scripts to give more flexibility to your definitions.
• Tracked analytics fields and cookies
  Usage Insights tracks data from several sources, including web and mobile analytics fields, and client-side cookies.