A Guide to ServiceNow Performance Analytics

For organizations that find the capabilities of ServiceNow reporting limited, ServiceNow provides Performance Analytics.

This post details everything you need to know about Performance Analytics—ServiceNow’s advanced reporting and data visualization solution. 

What is ServiceNow Performance Analytics?

ServiceNow Performance Analytics is a powerful, in-platform tool designed to help organizations track, measure, and visualize their performance over time. In simpler terms, it’s an advanced tool for reporting and data visualization.

While traditional operational reports give you a snapshot of the current data, Performance Analytics provides a dynamic, historical view that helps you to spot trends, predict future outcomes, and manage your services proactively. 

This shift helps you move from simply reacting to problems to making informed, data-driven decisions that align both your IT operations and business strategies with your long-term goals.

ServiceNow Performance Analytics vs. Platform Analytics vs. Reporting

Performance Analytics (PA): PA is ServiceNow’s advanced analytics/business intelligence solution, focused on historical trending, key performance indicators (KPIs), and operational dashboards within the ServiceNow instance. It provides predictive insights based on data available in the ServiceNow platform.

Reporting: The legacy ServiceNow reporting module allowed users to create basic charts and tables from ServiceNow data. It is in the process of being deprecated and replaced by platform analytics.

Platform Analytics: The modern, unified analytics layer in ServiceNow that replaces Reporting. Platform Analytics offers improved visualizations, self-service exploration, and a more integrated experience across modules, while still leveraging ServiceNow data for operational and strategic insights.

Does ServiceNow Performance Analytics Require an Additional License?

Yes — unlike standard ServiceNow reporting, Performance Analytics is a premium feature that typically requires additional licensing. Access is tied to your ServiceNow instance, which means only licensed users can view dashboards, scorecards, and KPI trends.

This licensing model has a few implications:

• Cost considerations: Expanding access to non-IT teams or business analysts may require purchasing extra licenses, which can increase the total cost of ownership.
• Limited external access: Unlike BI platforms where dashboards can be widely shared, Performance Analytics is primarily accessible to ServiceNow users, potentially restricting adoption across broader business functions.
• Strategic impact: For organizations looking to provide enterprise-wide analytics without inflating ServiceNow licensing costs, replicating ServiceNow data into a BI solution can be a more cost-effective and scalable approach.

In short, while Performance Analytics adds powerful insights within ServiceNow, organizations need to account for licensing costs and user access when planning broader analytics strategies.

When Should Organizations Use Performance Analytics Instead of Reporting/Platform Analytics?

Organizations should consider using Performance Analytics when they need more than just a snapshot of current data. 

While Reporting is ideal for viewing real-time records and managing day-to-day operations, Performance Analytics is designed for longer-term insights.

It enables teams to track performance over time, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions that support continuous improvement and strategic planning.

If the goal is to understand not just what is happening, but why it’s happening — and what might happen next — Performance Analytics is the better fit.

Reporting answers “where are we today?”

While ServiceNow Reporting provides a useful look into data as it exists on the platform today, it’s not equipped for more complex analytic tasks such as trend analysis. 

Such tasks require the ability to leverage historical and current data, as well as the changes in data over time. 

For example, if a team wants to see the total count of open incident tickets at any given moment, reporting will pull that data and present it instantly. 

This makes reporting ideal for managing records and understanding the current operational status, or the status of the particular moment reflected in the dataset. 

Performance Analytics answers “where did we come from?” and “where are we going?”

On the other hand, Performance Analytics not only provides current data, but also lets users see how things have evolved over time, helping them forecast future performance.

That’s where ServiceNow Performance Analytics (PA) comes in. Instead of just giving you a surface-level overview of data, it lets you dig deeper to: 

• Identify patterns in data over time
• Spot bottlenecks to optimize processes
• Make forward looking predictions to aid initiatives such as resource planning

For example, by analyzing trends in Priority 1 (P1) incidents over the past year, teams can identify recurring causes and peak times for critical outages. This insight enables proactive problem management, such as addressing systemic issues or allocating resources during high-risk periods.

Key Differences Between ServiceNow Reporting and Performance Analytics: Comparison Table

	Standard Reporting/Plarform Analytics	Performance Analytics
Perspective	“Where are we today?”	“What’s happening over time?”
Real-time support?	Dashboards must typically be refreshed to mimic real-time data	Real-time support
Data View	Current state snapshot	Historical trends and patterns
Forecasting	Not available	Built-in forecasting capabilities
Threshold Alerts	Basic reporting alerts	Advanced threshold monitoring
Visualization	Basic charts and tables	Interactive dashboards with drill-downs
Time to Value	Immediate	Weeks to implement properly

What Are the Key Features of Performance Analytics?

ServiceNow Performance Analytics offers a powerful set of tools to help you monitor, measure, and optimize your ITSM processes. Here’s a breakdown of its key features:

• Pre-built KPIs and Metrics: Performance Analytics comes with a comprehensive library of pre-built ITSM KPIs and metrics for various ServiceNow applications. This allows you to get started quickly and adopt ITSM best practices right from the get-go.
  
• Real-time Dashboards & Interactive Visualizations: Create role-based, dynamic dashboards that provide real-time visibility into your key metrics. With interactive visualizations, you can dig deeper into the data, spot trends, and pinpoint the root causes of performance issues.
  
• Historical Trend Analysis & Forecasting: Performance Analytics captures daily data snapshots, enabling you to analyze historical trends and forecast future performance. This way, you can analyse and anticipate bottlenecks, plan resources, and set achievable targets.
  
• Drill-Downs, Breakdowns, & In-Form Analytics: Performance Analytics offers detailed drill-downs and breakdowns, allowing users to click through from high-level KPIs to the underlying records or categories (such as priority, assignment group, or region). Breakdowns segment indicators by different dimensions (like category or location), enabling comparative analysis across various business units.
  
• Data Security, Scalability & Governance: Since PA is a naive platform solution, it has a robust security framework. This means your data is always protected and scalable to some extent.

What’s New In Performance Analytics In the Zurich Release?

2025’s Zurich release introduces a number of changes to Performance Analytics targeted at improving the user experience and the capabilities of the product. Following are a list of notable changes in Performance Analytics, introduced with Zurich:

Enhanced Indicator Management

With Zurich, indicator creation and management move into the Platform Analytics experience, providing a more streamlined and flexible workflow:

• Create indicators directly from Platform Analytics, reducing navigation steps and simplifying setup.
• Display additional fields — such as date last viewed and number of views — in the indicator management list using the new Viewed and Views columns.
• Show any field from the indicator record as a column in the indicator list for easier filtering, tracking, and auditing.

Updated UI with the Coral Theme

Zurich rolls out the Coral theme as the new default for portals, web, and mobile experiences:

• The Coral theme offers a clean, modern, brand-neutral design to improve usability and visual consistency.
• A dark theme option is also available, giving users more control over their viewing experience across both desktop and mobile.

Smarter Data Snapshot Enablement

Zurich introduces improved data snapshot functionality, allowing you to:

• Enable snapshots for multiple indicators directly from the indicator library, not just from within each individual indicator record.
• Benefit from enhanced confirmation messages and guidance during snapshot configuration, helping reduce setup errors and improving usability.

Best Practices for Using Performance Analytics

Getting started with ServiceNow Performance Analytics doesn’t have to be complex. With the right structure and focus, you can quickly build dashboards and insights that drive meaningful action across your organization. Here’s a simple step-by-step, best practice guide for getting started with Performance Analytics:

Prepare

1. Define Your KPIs and Objectives

Begin by identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your most important business goals. Don’t measure just for the sake of it—focus on metrics that reflect process health and impact, such as:

• Average incident resolution time
  
• First-contact resolution rate
  
• Change success rate

Make sure each KPI is linked to a business outcome, and involve stakeholders across teams to validate what matters most. This ensures your analytics are relevant and aligned with real operational goals.

2. Focus on High-Impact Use Cases First

Start small by selecting a high-value process area like Incident Management, HR Case Management, or Change Management. Build initial dashboards and indicators around this area to quickly demonstrate value and validate your setup. Once confident, expand into other processes.

3. Clean and Validate Your Data

Before setting up indicators, take time to audit your data. Ensure tables are free from duplicates, missing fields, or misclassified entries (e.g., incorrect priorities or assignment groups). Clean data ensures the accuracy of trends, forecasts, and real-time insights—and avoids misleading conclusions.

Build

4. Build Role-Based Dashboards

Create dashboards tailored to different roles:

• Executives may need high-level KPI summaries and monthly SLA compliance trends.
  
• Team leads might require daily ticket backlog views.
  
• Operations staff benefit from detailed drill-downs by assignment group, priority, or location.

Use visual elements like graphs, thresholds, and interactive filters to make dashboards intuitive and actionable for every audience.

5. Automate Data Collection

Use ServiceNow’s built-in scheduling to automate data snapshots and indicator updates. Set data collection frequencies that match your reporting cadence—daily for operational metrics, weekly or monthly for strategic reviews. Automation keeps your dashboards current without manual effort.

Assess

6. Set Targets and Thresholds

Add context to your metrics by configuring targets and thresholds for each KPI. For example:

• Alert managers when SLA compliance drops below 95%.
  
• Flag when ticket backlog exceeds a certain volume.

Thresholds enable proactive response and keep teams aligned with performance expectations.

7. Monitor, Analyze, and Improve

Use the analytics tools to drill down into trends, uncover root causes, and track the impact of improvements over time. Make performance reviews a regular rhythm, and adjust indicators or dashboards as your processes mature.

By following these steps, your organization can quickly unlock the full value of Performance Analytics—turning data into insight, and insight into action. And remember, as your use of the platform evolves, so should your KPIs, dashboards, and automation strategies.

Limitations of ServiceNow Performance Analytics

Whilst Performance Analytics provides organizations with more capable business intelligence features than standard ServiceNow reporting, it still has limitations that steer organizations towards alternatives. 

Many of these limitations are simply inherent to Performance Analytics being inside of the ServiceNow silo. 

As such, it is beholden to the performance of your ServiceNow instance, the data available to the platform, and the users with access to said platform. Limitations include:

1. Limited cross-functional analysis

Performance Analytics is constrained by the data that resides within the ServiceNow platform. While this makes sense for operational dashboards tied directly to ITSM, HR, or other ServiceNow modules, it becomes a bottleneck when organizations want to combine ServiceNow data with information from finance, CRM, ERP, or marketing systems. Without extracting and replicating ServiceNow data into a dedicated BI environment, cross-functional insights and organization-wide reporting remain out of reach.

2. Scalability and performance challenges

Because PA runs on top of the same ServiceNow instance used for operational workflows, reporting and analytics place additional load on the platform. Large datasets, frequent dashboard refreshes, or complex calculations can cause dashboards to become slow and unresponsive. This not only frustrates users but can also impact the performance of your live ServiceNow environment—something most organizations cannot afford.

3. Restricted access for non-ServiceNow users

Access to Performance Analytics is tied to ServiceNow licenses. This means that business analysts, data scientists, or executives who don’t need day-to-day access to ServiceNow workflows must either be granted additional paid licenses or rely on others to extract the data for them. In contrast, BI tools like Power BI or Tableau allow organizations to broadly distribute reports and dashboards without such licensing constraints.

4. Limited visualization and interactivity

Compared to modern BI platforms, the visualization options in Performance Analytics are basic. While PA offers line charts, bar graphs, and scorecards, it lacks the breadth of advanced visualizations (heat maps, geospatial charts, interactive drill-downs, AI-assisted insights) that make data more engaging and actionable for end users.

5. Cost considerations

Performance Analytics requires additional licensing on top of the core ServiceNow subscription. Organizations often find themselves paying a premium for functionality that is less flexible and powerful than standalone BI tools they already own.

6. Limited advanced analytics and AI capabilities

While ServiceNow has introduced some predictive features, PA does not match the advanced modeling, forecasting, and machine learning capabilities available in dedicated BI and data science platforms. This limits organizations that want to move beyond descriptive reporting to predictive and prescriptive analytics.

7. Maintenance overhead

Because PA is tied into your operational ServiceNow environment, maintaining historical datasets, performance indicators, and dashboards adds ongoing administrative complexity. In BI solutions, data pipelines and historical snapshots are easier to manage, automate, and scale independently.

Why Replicating ServiceNow Data Into a Purpose-Built BI Solution is the Better Long-Term Strategy

Organizations that treat ServiceNow as just one piece of their broader data ecosystem unlock far more value than those who confine analytics to the platform itself. Replicating ServiceNow data into a dedicated BI solution is not simply about overcoming the shortcomings of Performance Analytics — it’s about creating an environment where ServiceNow data can drive innovation, alignment, and growth.

1. Building a true single source of truth

Replicating ServiceNow data into a BI platform allows it to be blended with data from finance, HR, sales, marketing, and other systems. Instead of separate, function-specific dashboards, organizations gain unified reporting that supports enterprise-wide decision-making.

2. Empowering teams beyond IT

ServiceNow data is incredibly valuable to leaders outside of IT — CFOs tracking cost optimization, HR analyzing workforce productivity, or operations measuring service efficiency. A BI platform democratizes access, enabling non-technical teams to explore ServiceNow data in tools they already know.

3. Enabling richer storytelling with data

BI platforms excel at turning raw data into compelling visual narratives that resonate with executives and business stakeholders. Interactive dashboards, advanced visualizations, and AI-driven insights help stakeholders see the bigger picture — and act on it.

4. Supporting strategic planning and forecasting

While ServiceNow PA is strong for operational monitoring, BI tools add the ability to model future scenarios, forecast demand, and simulate outcomes. This makes ServiceNow data a strategic asset, not just an operational one.

5. Protecting ServiceNow performance and stability

ServiceNow was designed first and foremost as a workflow platform for ITSM and other business processes, not as a heavy analytics engine. Offloading intensive reporting and analysis into a BI solution reduces strain on the instance, ensuring ServiceNow can focus on what it does best: delivering reliable, performant IT service management and workflow automation.

6. Creating a scalable, futureproof data foundation

By centralizing ServiceNow data within a BI ecosystem, organizations build a data architecture that grows with them. New systems, larger datasets, and evolving analytics needs can be integrated seamlessly, ensuring that today’s investments continue to deliver value long into the future.

Why Perspectium Is the Best Choice for Replicating ServiceNow Data

Once organizations commit to replicating ServiceNow data into a purpose-built BI platform, the next question is how best to do it. Many teams default to either building out API connections or using a traditional ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) solution—both of which rely on ServiceNow’s REST API to facilitate data movement. While both can work in certain contexts, each comes with significant trade-offs:

• API ServiceNow integrations are good for dynamic, near real-time integrations, but they can be slow, difficult to scale, and prone to throttling when data volumes grow.
  
• ETL ServiceNow solutions are well suited for large bulk movements of data, but they typically run on scheduled batches, lack the ability to reflect real-time changes, and often introduce complexity and lag into reporting pipelines.

Perspectium offers the best of both worlds.
Unlike APIs or ETL alone, Perspectium was purpose-built for ServiceNow data replication. 

It combines the real-time responsiveness of APIs with the scale of bulk ETL replication — without the limitations of either approach. This means that with Perspectium, organizations benefit from:

• High throughput at scale – Perspectium can move enormous volumes of ServiceNow data far faster than APIs, while maintaining data integrity.
  
• One to many replication – Perspectium can replicate ServiceNow data within multiple target solutions simultaneously, without any additional impact on ServiceNow’s performance.
  
• Dynamic replication – Changes made in ServiceNow can be captured and reflected in BI platforms with minimal delay, enabling up-to-date reporting without overloading your ServiceNow instance.
  
• Operational stability – Because Perspectium offloads the work from ServiceNow, reporting and replication don’t affect the performance of your ITSM workflows.
  
• Purpose-built for ServiceNow – Unlike generic ETL tools, Perspectium understands ServiceNow’s data model natively, so replication is seamless, accurate, and requires less administrative overhead.

Perspectium is able to achieve this by avoiding the reliance on ServiceNow’s REST API to facilitate data movement. It is installed natively, meaning it is not an external solution calling into ServiceNow to request data. 

Instead, it uses efficient push technology to replicate ServiceNow data within a message bus. The message bus then handles the distribution of data downstream to one, or many solutions simultaneously with no additional impact on ServiceNow’s system resources. 

In short, Perspectium delivers a replication strategy that is faster, more efficient, and more reliable than either API or ETL alternatives. 

By leveraging Perspectium, organizations can ensure that ServiceNow continues to perform as a world-class ITSM platform while BI platforms receive the high-quality, high-volume data they need to drive enterprise-wide insight.

Want to create or improve an existing data pipeline between ServiceNow and your analytics solutions? Contact us today.