In today’s fast-paced business world, tracking and analyzing performance is essential for making informed decisions that can drive success. ServiceNow Performance Analytics is a powerful tool that enables organizations to measure and track their key performance indicators (KPIs) and gain insights that can help them improve their operations. In this blog post, we’ll give you a crash course on ServiceNow Performance Analytics, including indicator sources, indicators, breakdown sources, breakdowns, and jobs. We’ll use the use case of tracking how many Contacts (customer_contacts) are active in the system to demonstrate how Performance Analytics works.

What is ServiceNow Performance Analytics?

ServiceNow Performance Analytics is a module that allows you to measure, analyze, and track the performance of your business processes. It enables you to create customized reports and dashboards that give you insights into how your organization is performing. Performance Analytics uses a data-driven approach to help you identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement.

Indicator Sources

Indicator Sources are the data sources that you use to create indicators in Performance Analytics. They can be tables, scripted sources, and external data sources. For our use case, we’ll use the customer_contact table as our indicator source.

Indicators

Indicators are the metrics that you want to track using Performance Analytics. They can be anything from the number of tickets created to the percentage of incidents resolved within a certain timeframe. For our use case, we want to track how many customer contacts are active in the system. To create this indicator, we’ll use the customer_contact table as our indicator source and set the calculation type to “Count.”

Breakdown Sources

Breakdown Sources are the data sources that you use to create breakdowns in Performance Analytics. They allow you to group your indicators by different criteria, such as department, location, or product. For our use case, we’ll use the company table as our breakdown source.

Breakdowns

Breakdowns are the criteria that you use to group your indicators. They allow you to analyze your data from different perspectives and identify trends and patterns. For our use case, we want to group our customer contact indicator by company. To create this breakdown, we’ll use the company table as our breakdown source and set the breakdown element to “company.”

Jobs

Jobs are the processes that Performance Analytics uses to calculate indicators and generate data for reports and dashboards. They can be scheduled to run at regular intervals or run on-demand. For our use case, we want to schedule the job to run daily at midnight so that we can get an accurate count of active customer contacts each day.

Tracking Active Customer Contacts

Now that we’ve covered the basics of Performance Analytics, let’s walk through the process of tracking how many customer contacts are active in the system. To do this, we’ll need to create an indicator, a breakdown, and a job.

Step 1: Create an Indicator

To create an indicator, go to Performance Analytics > Indicators and click the “New” button. In the “New Indicator” form, select the customer_contact table as the indicator source and set the calculation type to “Count.” Give the indicator a name, such as “Active Customer Contacts,” and click “Submit.”

Step 2: Create a Breakdown

To create a breakdown, go to Performance Analytics > Breakdowns and click the “New” button. In the “New Breakdown” form, select the company table as the breakdown source and set the breakdown element to “company.” Give the breakdown a name, such as “Customer Contacts by Company,” and click “Submit.”

Step 3: Schedule a Job

To schedule a job, go to Performance Analytics > Jobs and click the “New” button. In the “New Job” form, select the “Active Customer Contacts” indicator and the “Customer Contacts by Company” breakdown. Set the schedule to run daily at midnight and click “Submit.”

Once you’ve completed these three steps, Performance Analytics will start collecting data and generating reports and dashboards based on your indicators and breakdowns. You can access your reports and dashboards by going to Performance Analytics > Analytics Hub.

To view the number of active customer contacts by company, you can create a report in Analytics Hub by selecting the “Active Customer Contacts” indicator and the “Customer Contacts by Company” breakdown. You can then filter the report by date or other criteria to get more detailed insights into your data.

Conclusion

ServiceNow Performance Analytics is a powerful tool that can help organizations measure and track their KPIs and gain insights that can drive business success. By using indicator sources, indicators, breakdown sources, breakdowns, and jobs, you can create customized reports and dashboards that give you a comprehensive view of your organization’s performance.

In our use case of tracking how many customer contacts are active in the system, we demonstrated how easy it is to create an indicator, a breakdown, and a job in Performance Analytics. By following these steps, you can start tracking your own KPIs and gain insights that can help you make informed decisions and drive success.