Advanced ServiceNow Reporting: A Guide

Taking advantage of advanced ServiceNow reporting capabilities—either on-platform or through integrations with top-tier reporting tools—can enhance data-driven decision-making, improve operational efficiency, and enable real-time insights across your organization.

ServiceNow has long been a cornerstone for IT service management (ITSM) in many organizations, offering an extensive range of capabilities for streamlining workflows, improving service delivery, and reporting for data in-platform.

From basic reporting in ServiceNow to more advanced analytics, the platform provides tools to gain deeper insights into IT operations, but not without limitations.

In this guide, we’ll not only walk you through how to create a ServiceNow report but also show you when to consider moving beyond standard reporting and explore more sophisticated analytics tools.

From exporting ServiceNow reports to Excel to integrating with best-in-class business intelligence solutions like Tableau, Power BI, and Yellowfin, we’ll highlight how you can optimize your ServiceNow reporting strategy.

We’ll also discuss the different approaches to integration, comparing technologies such as APIs and ETL, and their capacity to meet the demand for data associated with reporting.

By the end of this blog, you’ll have a solid understanding of how to use ServiceNow’s reporting features effectively, when to scale up to Performance Analytics, and how to integrate with external solutions to take your reporting capabilities even further.

Ready to unlock the full potential of ServiceNow reporting? Let’s dive in.

Why Optimize Your ServiceNow Reporting Strategy?

Whether you’re looking at standard reports or leveraging the power of Performance Analytics, optimizing your ServiceNow reporting strategy will help you get a clearer picture of your ITSM performance and identify areas for improvement.

Here’s a closer look at the key insights you can uncover using ServiceNow’s native reporting capabilities:

1. Operational Efficiency and Process Improvement

ServiceNow reports provide a comprehensive view of your ongoing service management activities. By examining reports related to incident management, change management, problem management, and other key ITSM processes, you can pinpoint inefficiencies and identify trends in how your team is performing. For example:

• Incident response times: By analyzing incident reports, you can assess how quickly your team is resolving issues and whether you’re meeting SLA targets.
  
• Change success rate: Monitoring change management reports helps determine whether changes are being implemented without significant issues, allowing you to fine-tune processes for smoother deployments.

2. Service Delivery and Customer Satisfaction

ServiceNow’s reports are invaluable for monitoring the quality of service provided to end-users. Whether through ServiceNow dashboards or individual reports, you can assess service delivery metrics, track response times, and measure customer satisfaction levels. For instance:

• Request fulfillment: Reporting on service requests (e.g., password resets, software installs) can show how quickly your team is fulfilling requests and whether there are any bottlenecks in the process.
  
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT): With survey data integrated into ServiceNow reports, you can track CSAT scores, giving you a direct measure of how well your services meet user expectations.

3. Resource Utilization and Team Performance

ServiceNow reporting allows you to monitor and measure how effectively your resources are being utilized. For example, you can generate reports that highlight:

• Resource allocation: Which team members are handling the most tickets, and are they overburdened or underutilized?
  
• Workload distribution: A report on workload distribution can identify if certain areas are overstaffed or understaffed, which helps in optimizing staffing levels for better efficiency.

This kind of insight is critical for managing your team’s workload and ensuring that the right resources are available to handle tasks as they arise.

4. Custom Metrics and ITSM KPIs

The flexibility of ServiceNow’s reporting system means you can create customized reports to track specific ITSM KPIs and metrics relevant to your organization’s goals. For example:

• Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR): Track how quickly issues are being resolved and pinpoint areas where processes can be streamlined.
  
• First Contact Resolution (FCR): Analyze how many incidents are resolved on the first contact with a support agent, which is key for measuring the efficiency of your support team.

5. Overview of Key Metrics via Dashboards

A commonly utilized feature of ServiceNow is the ability to create dashboards that offer instant visibility into key metrics, relevant to your organization and/or role. Dashboards can aggregate multiple reports, providing a bird’s-eye view of key metrics across different service management areas. This enables:

• At-a-glance monitoring: Your team can quickly check the status of critical metrics, such as open incidents or ongoing changes, and take immediate action if necessary.
  
• Interactive exploration: Dashboards allow users to drill down into the data for deeper insights—clicking on any metric to view more detailed reports or analysis.

6. Trends, Forecasting, and Predictive Analytics (Performance Analytics Only)

The real power of Performance Analytics (PA) in ServiceNow lies in its ability to identify trends and predict future outcomes. By analyzing historical data, you can:

• Spot emerging trends: Are incident volumes increasing in specific areas? Performance Analytics allows you to visualize and predict future demand, so you can proactively allocate resources and take preemptive action.
  
• Forecasting key metrics: Using predictive analytics, you can forecast key metrics like incident resolution times, SLA breaches, and request volumes, which empowers your team to plan ahead and manage capacity effectively.

Reporting in ServiceNow: Out of the Box Capabilities

ServiceNow is packed with powerful reporting tools that cater to a range of needs, from simple dashboards to advanced, real-time performance monitoring.

Whether you’re tracking IT service management KPIs or measuring overall system performance, ServiceNow’s built-in reporting capabilities offer a broad array of features.

These tools can help you generate insightful reports and leverage data to optimize IT workflows. But what exactly are these reporting features, and how do they stack up when it comes to meeting your organization’s needs?

ServiceNow’s core reporting tools are designed to make it easy for users to create, customize, and share reports. These reports can range from basic tabular and list reports to more complex visualizations such as pie charts and bar graphs. 

Key capabilities in this space include:

• Scheduled reports: Set reports to run automatically and be delivered via email, which is perfect for recurring updates.
  
• Dashboards and report creation: Organize and visualize multiple reports in one place to offer a broader view of your service management data.
  
• Visualization options: ServiceNow also offers the ability to generate various reports including map reports, pie charts and bar charts.

How to Generate Reports in ServiceNow

In this section, we’ll show you how to get started with creating your own reports in ServiceNow, providing step-by-step guidance on setting up custom reports, scheduling them for delivery, and integrating them into dashboards.

But if you’re looking to go beyond the basics and unlock advanced reporting, Performance Analytics might just be your next step.

Creating reports in ServiceNow is intuitive, allowing for quick and easy customization. ServiceNow Reports can be created or modified using the Report Designer, which provides a guided flow for configuring, editing, viewing, and sharing reports. Users can start by using out-of-the-box templates or design reports from scratch.

To View or Modify Existing Reports:

1. Navigate to the Reports Application:
   • Go to All > Reports or type “reports” in the navigation menu’s search bar.
2. Open a Report:
   • Click View / Run to see existing reports.
   • Use the My Reports tab to view reports you’ve created.
   • The Global and Group tabs show reports shared globally or with specific groups.
   • The All tab displays all reports accessible to the logged-in user.

To Create a New Report:

1. Access the Reports Application:
   • Go to All > Reports or type “reports” in the search bar.
2. Click “Create New”:
   • This will open the Data tab, where you need to fill in three key fields: Report Name, Source Type, and Data Source.
3. Name Your Report:
   • Enter a logical and descriptive name for your report in the Report Name field.
4. Select a Source Type:
   • Choose Data Source or Table.
     • Table: You will need to define all conditions to pull data from the table (e.g., filters, columns).
     • Data Source: Defines a standard set of conditions for querying tables, which can be reused across multiple reports.
5. Select a Data Source:
   • Choose the appropriate Data Source from the dropdown.
6. Click “Next” to proceed to the Type tab.
7. Choose Report Type:
   • Select the format for your report. Options include:
     • Bar Chart
     • Pie or Donut Chart
     • Time Series
     • Multidimensional Reports, etc.
8. Configure the Report:
   • Use the Configure tab to adjust how your data is displayed and visualized.
9. Style Your Report:
   • In the Style tab, customize visual aspects like:
     • Chart size
     • Colors (e.g., use color-coding by priority for Bar charts)
     • Other visual settings to enhance readability and presentation.

Note: To create or modify reports, users must have the appropriate permissions.

Controlling Access to Reports

Role-based access allows organizations to control access to sensitive data by restricting reports to specific users or groups. To view a report in-platform, a ServiceNow license is required. 

However, those with access can export reports in a number of common formats including .xls, .csv and .pdf. 

Sharing Reports Outside of ServiceNow

ServiceNow provides a number of features that allow reports to be shared externally. 

Typically, these features are limited to exporting static reports only, such as when exporting ServiceNow reports to Excel. Further, the platform imposes export limits to prevent excessive use of the export feature impacting the performance of the platform. 

To increase throughput, or to stream up-to-date ServiceNow data to external platforms in real-time, an integration and/or data replication solution is required.

Limitations of ServiceNow Reporting

While ServiceNow’s native reporting capabilities provide valuable insights into day-to-day operations, they do come with limitations. Especially when your reporting needs become more complex or require deeper analysis.

Understanding these constraints is key to knowing when it’s time to elevate your reporting efforts—either by upgrading to Performance Analytics (PA) or integrating with external business intelligence (BI) tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Yellowfin.

1. Limited Predictive and Trend Analysis

One of the primary limitations of ServiceNow’s standard reports is that they primarily offer a snapshot of past and current data. This can be useful for answering “What happened?”, but insight into “What will happen?” or “What could happen?” requires the ability to analyze trends in how a data set evolves over time.

For example:

• Trend Analysis: While you can track incident counts or SLA compliance over time, the platform doesn’t provide built-in forecasting or predictive analytics to help you anticipate future demand or risks.
  
• Forecasting Future Metrics: ServiceNow’s standard reporting doesn’t offer a sophisticated way to predict trends or project performance. As organizations look for ways to forecast staffing needs or predict service bottlenecks, this lack of predictive capabilities becomes a significant drawback.

2. Limited Customization and Complexity

While ServiceNow reports are customizable to an extent, there are limitations when it comes to designing more intricate reports. The built-in report builder can sometimes feel restrictive, particularly when it comes to:

• Advanced Calculations and Aggregations: While you can apply some basic filters and formulas within ServiceNow reports, performing complex aggregations or custom calculations can become cumbersome, requiring significant manual intervention.
  
• Complex Visualizations: ServiceNow provides some basic visualizations (pie charts, bar charts, etc.), but the platform lacks the level of sophistication found in specialized BI tools.

3. Lack of Real-Time Data and Dynamic Dashboards

Standard ServiceNow reports offer a snapshot of your data, but they don’t always reflect real-time changes. For operations that require instant visibility into key metrics—such as incident response times or change approvals—ServiceNow’s basic reporting can be insufficient.

Dashboards in ServiceNow can be helpful, but they often need to be manually refreshed or scheduled, making them less suitable for teams needing up-to-the-minute insights.

4. Scaling with Large Data Sets

As your organization grows and your data volume increases, ServiceNow’s native reporting tools may struggle to handle large datasets efficiently.

Complex queries or reports that aggregate large amounts of data can slow down system performance, causing delays in report generation and potentially impacting user experience.

This issue is especially apparent when trying to pull data from multiple modules, as the system can become overwhelmed with multiple simultaneous requests.

5. Limited Integration with External Data Sources

In today’s interconnected IT environments, organizations often need to merge ServiceNow data with information from other tools—whether that’s customer relationship management (CRM) systems, project management platforms, or other business applications.

ServiceNow’s reporting is primarily focused on in-platform data. While some integrations allow data to be pulled into ServiceNow, it is far more optimal to replicate ServiceNow data within external solutions where storage is cheaper and capabilities for analysis are more robust.

6. Limited Access Without a License

One significant limitation of ServiceNow’s reporting capabilities is that it requires a ServiceNow license for users to access and work with the data, resulting in restricted access for non-license holders.

Sharing ServiceNow reports outside of the platform is limited to static exports, and collaborating on reports in-platform requires a license.

As well as enabling more robust capabilities, an integration with a BI solution—where additional users are comparatively low cost—can help organizations reduce their licensing fees.

What About Upgrading to ServiceNow Performance Analytics?

As your reporting needs evolve, ServiceNow offers Performance Analytics (PA)—a powerful tool that moves beyond standard reports and provides real-time, interactive analytics.

Performance Analytics enables deeper insights by analyzing historical data, tracking trends and forecasting future performance. For example, you can assess how well your ITSM processes are performing over time, which helps guide decision-making at a strategic level.

Key features of Performance Analytics include:

• Real-time monitoring: With Performance Analytics, you get live dashboards that update automatically as data changes, giving you up-to-the-minute insights.
  
• Trend analysis and forecasting: PA uses historical data to predict future trends, which is invaluable for proactive decision-making.
  
• Drill-down capabilities: Unlike basic reports, PA lets you drill deeper into your data to identify underlying causes, uncover bottlenecks, and discover improvement opportunities.

Performance Analytics also integrates with ServiceNow’s broader reports and dashboards, allowing you to embed advanced analytics directly into your ServiceNow interface. While basic reports provide a snapshot of data, Performance Analytics offers a dynamic, evolving view of your service performance.

How to Get Started with ServiceNow Performance Analytics

Getting started with Performance Analytics (PA) in ServiceNow is straightforward, and with the right setup, it can quickly enhance your reporting capabilities. Here’s a streamlined guide to help you get up and running with PA.

1. Ensure You Have the Right Licensing

PA is a premium feature, so confirm that your ServiceNow plan includes it. If not, consult your ServiceNow representative to upgrade your subscription.

2. Enable Performance Analytics

Once you have the necessary license, activate PA by navigating to the Performance Analytics application in the ServiceNow instance. Make sure you enable both Performance Analytics and Widgets modules for full functionality.

3. Set Up Indicators and Data Sources

PA works by tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) from ServiceNow data. Define the indicators you want to monitor—like incident resolution time or SLA compliance—and ensure your data sources are populated with accurate, relevant data.

4. Build Dashboards and Widgets

Create custom dashboards by adding widgets that display your KPIs in visual formats (charts, graphs, etc.). Customize each widget to reflect your organization’s goals, and arrange them to track performance in real-time.

5. Set Up Alerts and Thresholds

Configure alerts for KPIs that exceed or fall below defined thresholds, ensuring that stakeholders are notified of performance issues before they escalate.

6. Monitor and Refine Your Dashboards

Review your dashboards regularly and refine them as necessary. Use PA’s trend analysis tools to identify patterns and adjust KPIs or data sources as your reporting needs evolve.

7. Leverage Performance Analytics Resources

Utilize ServiceNow’s documentation and community forums for guidance on advanced features and best practices.

With these simple steps, you can quickly set up Performance Analytics in ServiceNow and start tracking key metrics with customized dashboards and reports. While PA provides a strong foundation for real-time insights, organizations often have to consider integrating with external BI tools for even more advanced analysis as requirements evolve. 

Limitations of Performance Analytics: Still Room for Growth

Despite the advanced ServiceNow reporting capabilities offered by Performance Analytics (PA), it still falls short in several key areas when compared to the best-in-class reporting and business intelligence (BI) solutions available today.

1. Predictive and Trend Analysis: Not as Advanced as BI Solutions

PA does offer basic predictive capabilities and trend analysis, allowing you to forecast future performance based on historical data.

However, the predictive models are relatively simple compared to the advanced analytics and machine learning tools found in specialized BI solutions like Tableau or Power BI.

These BI tools provide far more sophisticated algorithms for trend forecasting, anomaly detection, and scenario analysis, enabling deeper insights that drive proactive decision-making. 

2. Limited Customization and Complexity

Performance Analytics is more flexible and capable than ServiceNow’s standard reporting tools. However, the level of customization and complexity it supports is still far below what you can achieve with external BI tools.

While you can build tailored reports within ServiceNow, PA is not as extensible as BI tools that support complex custom visualizations, intricate data models, and cross-platform reporting.

As your reporting needs grow and become more intricate, you’ll likely find that PA can’t keep up with the level of detail or the type of visualizations you require.

3. Inherent Limitations of the ServiceNow Silo

Despite the advanced features PA offers, it still shares many of the limitations of being siloed within the ServiceNow ecosystem, including:

• Scaling with Large Data Sets: As your organization scales, ServiceNow can struggle with performance when handling large or complex data sets.
  
• Limited Integration with External Data Sources: Bringing data into ServiceNow so that it can be utilized in Performance Analytics can be challenging.
  
• Limited Access Without a License: Much like the limitations of ServiceNow reporting, PA requires users to have the appropriate ServiceNow licenses to access and interact with the data, creating a barrier to much of the organization.

In summary, Performance Analytics is a powerful tool that enhances ServiceNow’s reporting capabilities by offering advanced features like predictive analysis, dynamic dashboards, and more customizable KPIs.

However, it still pales in comparison to the flexibility, depth, and integration capabilities offered by best-in-class reporting and BI solutions. 

For organizations that need truly sophisticated analytics, dynamic cross-platform reporting, or the ability to work with large and complex data sets, integrating ServiceNow data with Tableau, Power BI, and similar tools remains the gold standard.

Taking ServiceNow Reporting Even Further: Integrating ServiceNow with BI Tools

Integrating your ServiceNow data with best-in-class reporting and business intelligence (BI) tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Yellowfin can take your reporting to the next level. 

These external tools provide more advanced analytics capabilities, enhanced data visualizations, and seamless collaboration features that ServiceNow’s native reporting tools and Performance Analytics lack.

With a ServiceNow to business intelligence integration, organizations can:

1. Unlock Deeper Insights

BI tools like Tableau and Power BI allow you to combine ServiceNow data with data from other systems, giving you a more comprehensive view of your organization’s performance.

With advanced features like predictive analytics, data blending, and complex visualizations, these tools can uncover trends and insights that might not be immediately apparent within the confines of ServiceNow.

2. Enhance Visualizations & Reporting

While ServiceNow provides basic reporting and dashboard features, BI tools are designed for complex data analysis and richer visualizations.

Tableau and Power BI offer interactive dashboards, customizable charts, and dynamic filters that empower users to drill down into the data and get more granular insights.

This flexibility allows teams and decision makers to understand data in more meaningful ways—whether they have a ServiceNow license or not—making it easier to spot issues, track performance, and predict future trends.

3. Enable Cross-Platform Data Integration

ServiceNow excels at managing data within its platform, but it often requires additional integration to pull in data from other enterprise systems (CRM, ERP, HR, etc.).

BI tools offer seamless integration with a wide variety of data sources, enabling you to aggregate data from across your organization into a single, unified report.

This cross-platform analysis is critical for getting a 360-degree view of your business performance, which is crucial for strategic decision-making.

4. Collaborate and Share

BI platforms like Tableau, Yellowfin and Power BI support collaborative features that ServiceNow’s built-in reporting lacks.

You can easily share dashboards, reports, and insights across teams, automate report distribution, and even add commentary or annotations for further collaboration.

These features are especially useful when reporting needs to be shared with non-ServiceNow users, such as external stakeholders or senior executives.

Types of Integrations: API vs ETL vs Perspectium

When planning to integrate ServiceNow with external solutions, organizations should be aware that not all integrations are made equal. There are several options, and each options pros and cons in the context of enabling better reporting are detailed below:

1. API Integration

ServiceNow API Integrations are a versatile approach to connecting ServiceNow to third-party solutions.

They are typically point-to-point, and particularly useful in facilitating event-driven data transfer in real-, or near real-time data making them ideal for dashboards.

However, API integrations can strain ServiceNow’s performance when too many integrations are competing for system resources, or when moving large amounts of data (such as for periodic reporting). 

• Pros:
  • Real-time data: APIs can pull data in real-time (ServiceNow performance permitting), ensuring that your BI tools are always working with the most up-to-date information.
  • Granular Control: APIs allow for a high level of customization, enabling you to pull specific data or perform specific actions based on business rules.
    
• Cons:
  • Complex setup/maintenance: API integrations can add a lot of operational overhead as organizations scale up, and enterprise architectures become more complex.
  • Scalability: While APIs are great for small-to-medium datasets, they can struggle with larger volumes of data and/or when too many integrations are competing for system resources, leading to performance issues.
  • Hidden Costs: Sub-optimal performance, integration maintenance and data loss are just some of the hidden costs organizations face when relying on API solutions. Such hidden costs create a technical debt that builds as organizations outgrow the integration approach.

2. ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)

ServiceNow ETL integration tools are used to extract data from ServiceNow, transform it as needed (e.g., cleaning, formatting), and load it into a destination such as a Data Warehouse or BI tool.

• Pros:
  • Batch Processing: ETL is well-suited for handling large volumes of data on a scheduled basis, making it best-suited for environments and/or requirements involving massive datasets.
  • Data Transformation: ETL tools allow you to transform data during the extraction process, so you can clean, aggregate, and reshape data before it’s loaded into a BI tool.
    
• Cons:
  • Latency: Since ETL processes data in batches, it’s not ideal for real-time reporting. There will be a delay between when data is extracted from ServiceNow and when it’s available in your BI tool.
  • Complexity: Setting up an ETL pipeline can be complex, requiring integration between multiple systems and significant data preparation work.
  • Hidden Costs: Sub-optimal performance, integration maintenance and data loss are just some of the hidden costs organizations face when relying on ETL solutions. Such hidden costs create a technical debt that builds as organizations outgrow the integration approach.

3. Perspectium Integration

Perspectium provides a robust solution specifically designed to move ServiceNow data into external systems with minimal effort. Capable of replicating over 40 million records every day—without impacting ServiceNow’s performance—Perspectium is unlike traditional API or ETL integrations.

The fully managed data replication solution is installed natively within ServiceNow, allowing it to use more efficient, internal mechanisms to push data out of the platform into a message bus. Then, its publish-and-subscribe architecture enables distribution to target solutions to be decoupled from ServiceNow’s operational resources, allowing for highly scalable, high-throughput data movement.

• Pros:
  
  • Real-time and Batch: Perspectium allows you to replicate ServiceNow data in real time and in batches containing huge volumes of data, providing the best of both ETL and API capabilities.
  • Simplicity: Unlike typical ETL and API solutions, Perspectium is implemented and maintained as-a-service, making it no-code, configure-only for end–users. 
  • Scalable: Designed to handle large volumes of data, Perspectium can scale as your organization grows and your data needs increase.
    
• Cons:
  • Cost: Perspectium is a premium service, and while it simplifies the integration process, it may come with a higher initial cost compared to API or ETL solutions. However, for enterprise-scale organizations with significant volumes of data, the solution is more cost-effective as it avoids hidden costs associated with integration maintenance and more. 
  • Less Flexibility: While Perspectium is excellent for replicating ServiceNow data to external systems, it lacks the versatility of many API solutions that work with a wider range of source systems.

Perspectium: The Best of Both Worlds … and Then Some

When choosing an integration method to connect ServiceNow to external solutions, Perspectium stands out as the best of both worlds—and more.

Unlike traditional API or ETL solutions that can struggle with scalability, complexity, and hidden costs, Perspectium provides a fully managed integration platform designed for seamless, high-throughput data replication.

Whether you need real-time updates or the ability to move massive datasets amounting to over 40 million records per day, Perspectium offers unmatched flexibility and efficiency.

API integrations are great for real-time data but can become overwhelmed when handling large volumes or multiple concurrent connections. ETL tools, while suited for batch processing, introduce latency and added complexity.

Perspectium, however, provides the best of both worlds—real-time and batch replication of vast amounts of data without compromising on performance. With its no-code, configure-only setup, Perspectium is simple to implement and maintain, even as your data needs scale.

Additionally, Perspectium removes the hidden costs associated with traditional API and ETL solutions, such as maintenance overhead, system performance issues, and data loss. It’s an investment that not only simplifies your integration but also scales efficiently as your organization grows.

Contact Perspectium today to speak with us about your ServiceNow reporting requirements and learn how we move up to 40 million records per day, without degrading ServiceNow’s performance. Let us show you how to take your data operations to the next level!