The Ultimate Guide to ServiceNow Dashboards

For many organizations, a solution like ServiceNow can generate millions of rows of data per day, making it challenging to find relevant insight, promptly. 

ServiceNow dashboards help to streamline such insight, making it possible for those with access to the platform to tailor visualizations to include only information relevant to their work.

However, due to the limitations of the ServiceNow platform—from access, to performance issues and more—many organizations are utilizing third-party solutions to create ServiceNow dashboards and/or dashboards that include ServiceNow data. 

This article explores the dashboard options native to ServiceNow, and how ServiceNow can integrate with third-party solutions to create more effective and comprehensive dashboards that include ServiceNow data.

Dashboards in ServiceNow: An Overview

The ServiceNow platform lets users create their own dashboards, and/or utilize pre-made dashboards—many of which are available on the ServiceNow store for free. 

Many of the pre-made dashboards available via the store are visual interfaces aiming to provide overviews of critical ITSM metrics and KPIs for specific job functions and solutions, such as cybersecurity, HR, and various C-suite roles. 

Pre-Made Dashboards on the ServiceNow Store: Key Examples

Following, are some key examples of pre-made ServiceNow dashboards available on the store.

CIO Dashboard: The Chief Information Officer Dashboard empowers IT leaders with a real-time, organization-wide view of performance across value, operations, security, execution, and experience. Built natively on the Now Platform using Platform Analytics, it enables data-driven decision-making through business-aligned KPIs and interactive, drillable visualizations. The CIO dashboard consolidates data from ITSM, SPM, SecOps, HRSD, and other systems to guide IT in delivering innovation, aligning with strategic goals, and scaling operations effectively

CEO Dashboard: The CEO Dashboard provides executive leadership with a three-pane, real-time view of operations. Built directly on the platform, it enables leaders to take immediate action from insights without switching systems. It also supports a workflow-based, process-centric view of the business and acts as a unified operating model to drive productivity, speed, and risk reduction across the enterprise.

CISO Dashboard: The Chief Information Security Officer Dashboard provides a single-pane view of end-to-end security operations. It highlights risks categorized by impact and likelihood using heatmaps, surfaces non-compliant policies, tracks overdue security incidents by business service, and monitors the status of vulnerability patching, including critical and overdue items. It also displays open security audit tasks by priority and overdue status. 

HR Success Dashboard: The HR Success Dashboard provides HR leadership and process owners with insights into HR Service Delivery (HRSD) performance through ServiceNow-defined KPIs. It visualizes metrics like call deflection, self-service, requests completed, customer satisfaction, and SLA breaches. Users can drill down into contributing KPIs and underlying records to perform deep analysis and drive improvement. The dashboard includes contextual help and supports KPI configuration and time-based aggregations.

These pre-built dashboards can offer more immediate value for organizations getting started with ServiceNow reporting. However, as organizations mature in their ServiceNow usage, they often discover that these out-of-the-box solutions represent just the starting point for their reporting needs.

Building Custom Dashboards in ServiceNow

As well as utilizing pre-made dashboards, ServiceNow users can also create custom dashboards using a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface. 

Users can arrange widgets into preferred layouts, select relevant data sources, and configure visualizations to match specific needs. 

The platform also allows for role-based control, ensuring different user groups can access dashboards relevant to their role. 

This degree of customization and control allows organizations to highlight the ITSM metrics and KPIs that matter most, and leverage dashboards that better reflect their unique requirements.

How to Share Dashboards in ServiceNow

Sharing dashboards with other ServiceNow users is straightforward through the platform’s built-in role-based access controls. Dashboard owners can grant other users view-only or edit permissions, creating a shared, collaborative view of data.

Depending on your role—such as admin, dashboard_admin, pa_admin, or pa_power_user—you can share dashboards with individual users, groups, or even other roles directly from the Sharing panel.

For end users, the process is simple: navigate to a dashboard, open the Share panel, and add the intended recipients. Owners can choose whether to notify recipients with an email invitation and can customize the message if desired.

Administrators have additional control through system properties, such as restricting which roles can share dashboards (glide.cms.share_dashboards.role) and applying security rules to the lists of users and groups available for sharing (glide.cms.dashboards.sharing_with_secure_search). These settings ensure that sensitive data only reaches the right audience.

While sharing and collaborating on dashboards within the ServiceNow platform is straightforward, challenges arise when sharing with stakeholders who lack ServiceNow licenses. Typically, organizations must export static views of dashboards—essentially screenshots or PDF reports—to share with stakeholders outside the ServiceNow ecosystem. 

This approach eliminates the interactive elements that make dashboards valuable and creates a time-consuming manual process. The static nature means that by the time they’re shared, the data may already be outdated.

The Limitations of Dashboards in ServiceNow

Despite their flexibility, ServiceNow dashboards come with important limitations.

• Lack of Real-Time Updates: Most dashboard widgets don’t update automatically. List views, charts, and other common widgets require manual refreshes, and while some organizations attempt to simulate real-time functionality by increasing refresh rates, this often leads to degraded performance. Only a handful of widgets—such as the Single Score widget—can support true real-time updates when configured correctly.
  
• Performance Concerns: Pushing dashboards to refresh too frequently, especially when pulling from large datasets or serving many concurrent users, can strain the platform and negatively impact system responsiveness.
  
• External Sharing Restrictions: As noted, dashboards are only interactive for licensed ServiceNow users. For external stakeholders, exports are static, manual, and often outdated by the time they’re distributed.

These limitations often drive organizations to look for ServiceNow data replication and/or integration solutions to connect the platform with purpose-built business intelligence tools.

With a ServiceNow-to-BI integration, organizations can extend dashboarding capabilities beyond ServiceNow’s native constraints.

Integrating ServiceNow with Third-Party Dashboards

ServiceNow, as a modern, IT Service Management (ITSM) platform, processes enormous volumes of operational data daily. From incident tickets and change requests to asset management and performance metrics, the platform captures every detail of your IT ecosystem.

This wealth of information holds tremendous value not just for ServiceNow users, but for business leaders, executives, and stakeholders who need visibility into IT operations while lacking direct platform access.

The challenge lies in making this data accessible, actionable, and real-time. While ServiceNow offers native dashboard capabilities, many organizations discover that these built-in solutions have significant limitations when it comes to comprehensive reporting and cross-platform data analysis.

As such, they implement data replication and integration solutions that make ServiceNow data available in third-party solutions. 

What is a ServiceNow-to-BI Integration?

A ServiceNow-to-BI integration is a solution for connecting the ITSM platform to purpose-built BI and analytics tools such as Power BI, Tableau, or Yellowfin. Such integrations enable organizations to pull ServiceNow data into more sophisticated reporting environments.

The Benefits of Integrating ServiceNow with BI Solutions

Integrating ServiceNow with third-party business intelligence solutions overcomes the limitations of working within ServiceNow, enabling organizations to combine data from multiple sources, deliver interactive dashboards to non-ServiceNow users, and leverage advanced analytics capabilities that drive faster, more informed decision-making.

Analyze Combined Data Sources: Third-party integrations allow organizations to combine ServiceNow data with information from other critical systems—network monitoring tools, cloud platforms, CMDB integrations, and customer-facing applications. This comprehensive view eliminates data silos.

Democratize Data Access: Third-party dashboard solutions enable organizations to share ServiceNow insights with stakeholders who don’t have ServiceNow licenses. Business leaders, executives, and external partners can access interactive dashboards through familiar BI tools without requiring expensive ServiceNow user licenses.

Access Best-in-Class Features: Specialized BI platforms offer sophisticated analytics capabilities that far exceed ServiceNow’s native options, including advanced statistical analysis, predictive modeling, and highly customizable visualizations.

Challenges of Integrating ServiceNow with Third-Party Dashboards

While integrating ServiceNow with third-party dashboards offers significant benefits, the approach chosen can introduce new challenges—particularly around real-time performance, scalability, and system impact.

Traditional Integration Approaches

ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Integrations: ETL solutions are designed for scheduled batch data movement, pulling large volumes of data at fixed intervals. They excel for historical reporting but are ill-suited for live dashboards, where timely, real-time updates are critical for actionable insights. While they interact with the ServiceNow REST API to retrieve data, they do not operate in the same way as API integrations.

API-Based Integrations: API integrations allow for real-time, event-driven data movement and in theory, appear ideal for dashboards. However, APIs share system resources with ServiceNow users, meaning that heavy API activity can slow down both dashboard updates and the platform itself. As the number of integrations or data consumers grows, this resource contention can significantly impede ServiceNow performance, delaying data delivery, reducing dashboard responsiveness, and preventing organizations from enjoying real-time data.

The Scalability Challenge

As organizations scale their ServiceNow usage—adding more data, endpoints, or integration targets—the limitations of ETL and API approaches become more pronounced. As both ETL and API solutions are reliant on the ServiceNow REST API to retrieve data, usage and throughput can create performance bottlenecks for platform users and the data pipeline. 

Such issues are exacerbated when ServiceNow is integrated with multiple solutions downstream via point-to-point solutions. With this approach, each integration queries ServiceNow independently, resulting in repeated data retrieval, redundant transactions, and growing strain on the platform. Over time, this can prevent dashboards from delivering real-time insights and compromise operational efficiency.

• See also: Why You Should Avoid API-Based ServiceNow Integrations

Overcoming the Scalability Challenge: How Perspectium Integrates ServiceNow with Third-Party Dashboards

Perspectium’s DataSync addresses the limitations of traditional ServiceNow integrations by combining the benefits of both bulk and dynamic data movement while solving scalability challenges.

The key differentiator is Perspectium DataSync’s push technology and message bus-enabled, publish-and-subscribe architecture.

Instead of relying on ServiceNow’s REST API for data extraction, DataSync is installed natively within ServiceNow, and leverages more efficient push technology to replicate data in a message bus.

The message bus then delivers the data to systems downstream, eliminating REST API-related resource contention and performance bottlenecks.

Specialized Solution for Real-Time Data at Scale

Perspectium enables real-time, scalable data delivery without overloading ServiceNow, via:

• Native Push Technology: DataSync moves data efficiently out of ServiceNow using native push mechanisms instead of repeated API queries. This reduces system resource usage and ensures dashboards receive near real-time updates.
  
• Message Bus Architecture: Data is replicated from ServiceNow once to a message bus, which can then distribute to one, or multiple endpoints simultaneously. This approach avoids the inefficiencies of point-to-point integrations, ensuring timely delivery to dashboards, analytics platforms, and other systems while minimizing load on ServiceNow.
  
• Flexible Replication Options: Perspectium supports dynamic, batch, and scheduled replication modes. Organizations can configure real-time updates for critical dashboards while using batch processing for analytics or data warehousing—all within a single solution.

By leveraging these specialized approaches, organizations can maintain high-performance, real-time dashboards and analytics without compromising ServiceNow’s reliability or scalability.

Implementation and Maintenance Advantages

Perspectium DataSync is implemented and maintained as a managed service by ServiceNow integration experts. It also allows organizations to consolidate and shed existing integration solutions to reduce maintenance overhead when testing new releases and troubleshooting issues.

Dynamic, Real-time Data Movement

Perspectium’s event-driven architecture allows organizations to move only records that have changed, minimizing redundant transfers and making the data pipeline more efficient.

Perspectium in Action at ServiceNow

ServiceNow itself uses Perspectium internally for reporting, validating the solution’s scalability, reliability, and performance at the highest level.

Making the Right Choice for Your Organization

While ServiceNow dashboards offer a strong starting point for operational monitoring, mature organizations quickly encounter the limitations of native dashboards—data silos, sharing restrictions, and limited analytics capabilities.

Modern integration solutions like Perspectium DataSync overcome these challenges, enabling scalable, real-time delivery of ServiceNow data to purpose-built dashboards and other systems.

For organizations seeking to maximize the value of ServiceNow data, Perspectium could be a key strategic partner. Contact us today to learn more about how we help ServiceNow users take control of their data.