Integrating ServiceNow Data with Dynamic Dashboards

Integrating ServiceNow data with dynamic dashboards helps organizations benefit from real-time visibility into their use of ServiceNow among other things.

Integrations can automate the transfer of ServiceNow data to solutions such as Tableau and Power BI, where dashboards boasting a range of useful visualizations support users and business leaders. 

Some integrations can even achieve this transfer dynamically, where data that matches user-defined conditions is automatically extracted and replicated within the target.

Such integrations help create comprehensive dashboards that display the real-time status of performance, incidents, SLAs, etc.

While the ServiceNow platform provides its own dashboard, its applications are limited. One key limitation is that ServiceNow dashboards are limited to ServiceNow data only, meaning the insight provided cannot be contextualized with the wider enterprise. 

This is a problem for many organizations using ServiceNow, as they often have a requirement to combine ServiceNow data with multiple other sources.

What are Dynamic Dashboards?

Dynamic dashboards refer to platforms for visualizing data and insight that are updated in real-time with information relevant to the user.

Unlike static reports that capture performance insights at a specific point in time, dynamic dashboards offer timely intelligence on critical metrics and real-time visibility into internal operations. 

Real-time insights drive critical business decisions in modern organizations that capitalize on data. Today, business executives are switching to dynamic dashboards from static reports for more comprehensive insight.

To maximize the value of insight, ServiceNow users a must combine their ServiceNow data with third-party dynamic dashboards to produce insight that reflects the whole organization.

Why Integrate ServiceNow Data with Third-party, Dynamic Dashboards?

There are a number of reasons why organizations want to integrate ServiceNow data with dynamic dashboards. We cover some of the most notable examples here:

Improving Data Availability and Data Democratization

Different areas of an organization require different information to support their roles. But that information isn’t always in a system that is connected to those roles. 

For instance, CEOs will want data visualizations that highlight factors influencing business performance. 

In contrast, such information would not provide as much value to a CIO. A CIO would gain more value from a dashboard that visualizes the use of IT systems within the organization. For example, a dashboard that highlights the real-time status of P1 incidents. 

Yet in both cases, both the CIO and CEO’s dashboards would need to reflect a combination of data from different sources, covering all relevant systems – often from systems/platforms they do not have direct access to. 

By integrating ServiceNow data with an external data repository, the platform’s data can be easily combined with other enterprise data and visualized – in context – via dynamic dashboards.

This means CIOs, CEOs, and all other data stakeholders can have controlled, self-service access to data and insights that relate to their duties.

Improving and Preserving ServiceNow’s Performance

Since generating reports and dashboards with large data sets consumes a lot of ServiceNow’s operational bandwidth, ServiceNow’s performance also benefits from integrations with third-party dynamic dashboards. 

Integrating the data with dashboards via an external repository means that when a report is required, or dashboard updated, the ServiceNow platform does not need to be queried. This gives the ServiceNow platform less to do, preserving the performance of the platform.

Whatever the use case is, an organization’s teams and leaders can make more contextualized and efficient use of ServiceNow data when it is extracted and/or replicated from the platform. It can then be made available for visualizations within purpose-built dynamic dashboards that pull from multiple data sources.

Real-world Examples of Integrating ServiceNow Data with Dynamic Dashboards 

Thanks to a partnership between ServiceNow and integration-as-a-service provider, Perspectium, ServiceNow users have an easy way to populate third-party dashboards with ServiceNow data. 

Perspectium is a ServiceNow-native application for extracting and replicating ServiceNow data, delivered and managed as-a-service, by ServiceNow integration experts.

Accenture, Paypal, and ServiceNow themselves are just a few examples of organizations where Perspectium has helped integrate ServiceNow data with dynamic dashboards. 

Read on to learn more about the success stories:

ServiceNow

As one of the leading ITSM tools on the market, it makes sense that ServiceNow uses its solution internally, and extensively. The organization uses multiple ServiceNow instances and requires the ability to combine data from those platforms for comprehensive analysis. 

Despite ServiceNow providing its own means of extracting data from the platform, ServiceNow recognized the potential in Perspectium’s solutions that allow massive throughput without impacting the platform’s performance. 

With the ability to extract massive amounts of data quickly, and without affecting performance, Perspectium allows ServiceNow to benefit from advanced reporting and analytics solutions.

With Perspectium’s integrations, ServiceNow can transfer data from 10 production instances of ServiceNow into 4 SAP HANA databases to create insights accessible by teams ranging from Sales, Marketing, Finance, and more.

Different teams at ServiceNow use the Now Platform’s capabilities extensively for various use cases. ServiceNow experts transfer the data to external databases to maintain optimal performance across multiple production instances.

This approach offers real-time insights and a comprehensive overview of each department’s performance and needs. The integration of ServiceNow data with third-party dashboards proves to be an effective strategy for achieving a holistic, data-driven view of the organization. 

Of Perspectium’s integrations, Venugopal Malyala, Senior Director of BI, MDM & Analytics said: 

“We have deployed about 200 dashboards, and we have 5 predictive solutions in production today. We are getting great value from these integrations.”

Perspectium at ServiceNow: Get the Case Study.

PayPal 

At PayPal, Business Intelligence (BI) teams prefer using best-in-class BI tools like PowerBI and Tableau to create reporting dashboards and visualize data and insights. 

While they sought to transfer ServiceNow data to these reporting tools, they wanted to keep ServiceNow’s performance intact. 

With Perspectium’s API-free approach to extracting ServiceNow data, they achieved just that. 

Perspectium implemented an integration allowing ServiceNow data to be transferred to an external database to facilitate reporting in PowerBI, Tableau, and other dedicated reporting tools to create dynamic dashboards. 

PayPal found that Perspectium’s reliable automation capability and robust architecture allowed them to scale massively while enabling self-service reporting. Since maintaining a distinct reporting function wasn’t PayPal’s forte, self-service access for reporting was crucial.

Different teams across PayPal could easily meet their unique reporting needs – teams could collaborate and share data via external databases, enabling the creation of use-case-specific dashboards. 

Thanks to its high availability and scalability, Perspectium made it possible for PayPal’s staff to access real-time data and insight via dashboards, as and when required. 

Perspectium at PayPal: Get the Case Study.

Accenture 

Accenture sends ServiceNow data to reporting dashboards so that their CIO, HR team and others can benefit from visualizations of the information they require.

Within Accenture, many different business functions, departments and even individuals (such as the CIO) have their own dashboard. Many of these stakeholders of ServiceNow data do not have direct access to the platform.

But thanks to Perspectium, Accenture has an easy means of getting data out of ServiceNow, and into various, dynamically updated dashboards in real-time.

The dashboards are used to visualize metrics including those related to SLAs, staffing, process improvement, creating heat maps, and more.

Perspectium at Accenture: Get the Case Study.

Why Choose Perspectium for Integrating ServiceNow Data with Dynamic Dashboards?

As indicated by ServiceNow’s endorsement and use of our solutions, Perspectium is an integration-as-a-service provider ServiceNow users can trust. 

Created by the founding developer of ServiceNow, David Loo, Perspectium’s applications and services are tailor-made to address common issues faced by ServiceNow users when extracting data.

Thanks to our application’s architecture, our DataSync application can extract and replicate massive amounts of ServiceNow data without impacting performance. 

It does this by eliminating the need for external calls to the ServiceNow platform to initiate data transfers. Such external calls require ServiceNow’s operational bandwidth, meaning that the process of transferring data can slow down ServiceNow, particularly when large data volumes are involved. 

This negatively impacts operations connected to the use of ServiceNow, and can actually prevent dashboards from providing real-time insights. This is because the performance impacts impede the speed at which these dashboards can be populated.  

In contrast, Perspectium DataSync is implemented natively within ServiceNow, so external calls (API/web services-based integrations) are not required to initiate transfers. 

This helps preserve the performance of ServiceNow. The Perspectium approach also involves transferring data from ServiceNow to a cloud-enabled queue that the eventual target pulls from. So ServiceNow’s operational bandwidth is not required when retrieving data to populate databases. 

This also has the added bonus of protecting against data loss should there be an outage at the target system.

With both manual and dynamic-based sharing available, Perspectium DataSync can provide data to dashboards in real-time so that the insight available is always up-to-date.

Connect with Perspectium’s integration experts to learn more about our integration capabilities for ServiceNow.