Overview

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ServiceNow allows agents to create reports quickly and easily, but they can be tricky, and setting them up inefficiently can lead to incorrect data or slow loading times.
 

Building a Report

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One of the most important things to keep in mind when building a report is what data you are trying to convey. If you know your audience is limited to a certain group of filter, hard code that filter to the report instead of relying on the interactive filters of a dashboard. Instead of building multiple reports with the same datasets, think about using the alternative group by fields - this will let you have one report where the users can select what they want to see on the x-axis.

Building a Dashboard

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When you first start to build reports, it's important to keep in mind who the audience for the reports are.

The ServiceNow admin team tends to build reports for a wide audience, and because of that, the dashboards and reports are built with broad conditions to allow specific teams to filter in on their work. For instance, they'll build a dashboard that shows all closed tickets in the system, with a filter for all assignment groups in the system. These types of dashboards are slow to load and inadvisable for you to make.

Some of the tips that the ServiceNow team uses to help reduce load time for these dashboards is to:

• Limit display data to the top 10 or 20 values.
• Limit the reports to a finite time period. The more dates a report has to aggregate or calculate, the longer it will take to load.
• Don't stack by on fields that have a lot of values. For instance, stacking by Priority - which only has 4 possible values - is going to load much faster than stacking by Service Offering - which has hundreds of possible values. In general, stacking and grouping will generally cause load times to suffer.
• Don't report on the task table if you don't need to. If your team only deals in Catalog Tasks and Cases, report on those specific tables.
• Put different report conditions on different tabs. If you can, break up some reports as fixed dates or fixed conditions and put them all on one tab and then add a second tab for reports that need a date filter or represent a different time frame.

  

 

Most dashboard created will have a specific audience. In order to minimize load times on the these dashboards, there are some additional tips:

• If you are creating a dashboard for multiple assignment groups, do not use a filter of 'Assignment Group' starts with 'ITS-SN', instead, spend the extra time to list out the individual assignment groups using 'Assignment Group' is 'ITS-SNOW', 'Assignment Group' is 'ITS-SNOWTeam', etc. Using contains or starts with on a report will drastically slow it down.
• If you are creating a dashboard for a wide audience, think about using the 'is dynamic' filters. The 'My Team' dynamic filter will only show items that are assigned to the user's Assignment Groups and can help load only the relevant data without relying on a larger dashboard filter.
• Keep the simple reports at the top half of a dashboard, those are the first to load.