How to Create ServiceNow Dashboards

Organizations can create ServiceNow dashboards to support them in visualizing data and trends. 

This post highlights the notable features of ServiceNow Dashboards, how they are created, and the alternatives available for data-driven organizations with more extensive requirements than ServiceNow can offer. 

Table of Contents:

• What are ServiceNow Dashboards?
• How to Create ServiceNow Dashboards
• Why Third-party Dashboards May Be Better for Your Organization
• How To Integrate ServiceNow Data with Third-party Dashboards

What are ServiceNow Dashboards?

ServiceNow Dashboards are a user interface for displaying data and metrics regularly used by an organization in a single location. Users create ServiceNow dashboards to convey meaningful information in an easily digestible format to users.

Customizing ServiceNow Dashboards

ServiceNow dashboards provide an interface for visualizing reports, analytics, and multiple widgets on one screen. 

These customizable dashboards allow users to highlight crucial business information tailored for specific roles, such as IT help desk agents, or to track vital performance metrics like service level compliance.

Responsive Dashboards and Interactive Filters

ServiceNow users can leverage its inbuilt Responsive Dashboards to share a variety of widgets, including reports and Performance Analytics visuals. 

They highlight business-critical information tailored for specific roles, such as IT help desk agents, or to track vital performance metrics like service level compliance. 

One of its most beneficial features is the ability to apply interactive filters. When adjusting a specific report or chart on a dashboard, it can automatically refine other related widgets. 

Multi-tabbed Display

Another notable feature of ServiceNow Dashboards is the multi-tabbed display. These dashboard tabs function similarly to web browser tabs, allowing users to effortlessly switch between tabs and dive into different content layers without reopening the dashboard.

For ServiceNow users, dashboards and the multi-tabbed display help streamline operations and deliver business-ready insights at a glance. 

ServiceNow Dashboards Are for ServiceNow Data Only

ServiceNow Dashboards centralize fragmented data within the platform, presenting a coherent visual narrative of organizational workflows and processes. 

By consolidating crucial metrics and information, they help users identify trends, address potential issues, and make data-driven decisions.

However, unlike many third-party solutions supporting dashboards, ServiceNow dashboards are limited to utilizing ServiceNow data only. 

This limitation is particularly undesirable for data-driven organizations that wish to benefit from a holistic view of their enterprise data, and combine data from multiple sources.

How to Create ServiceNow Dashboards?

Users can create ServiceNow Dashboards and edit them via the user-friendly drag-and-drop canvas, arrange content into their preferred layout, and share it with other stakeholders for collaboration.

Users can access dashboards from the Application Navigator. Typically, users will see their last viewed dashboard on the display. For organizations using multiple dashboards, users can select which one they wish to view from the menu. 

Here’s a simplified step-by-step guide to the dashboard creation process in ServiceNow:

• Preview & Add Widget: The first step involves choosing the category of widget the users wish to add.
  
  For example, if a user wants to add a Performance Analytics widget, they need to choose that category and populate the desired widget on the dashboard. 

• Adjust Widget Size & Placement: Widgets can be resized effortlessly by dragging the corners. Moreover, repositioning them is as simple as moving them by their headers.
  
  As one widget is adjusted, the surrounding widgets will automatically reconfigure to accommodate the change, ensuring a cohesive look.
  
• Customize Widget Appearance: Each widget comes with customization options. Users can decide whether to show or hide its border, toggle the display of the widget’s title, and align the title to their preference.
  
  Once customizations are finalized, changes can be applied, giving the dashboard a personalized touch.
  
• Add Dashboard Tabs: Tabs help organize content on the dashboard in a logical sequence. Creating a new tab is very easy — users can do it through the context menu or the configuration panel. They must name each tab for easy identification.

Other Useful ServiceNow Dashboard Tips

• Sharing Dashboards: Dashboards are designed for collaborative work. They serve as a single source of truth, reducing potential confusion and errors. Dashboard owners can share them with specific users, groups, or even by role.
  
  For instance, granting access to a user X can be accompanied by a personalized message, ensuring clear communication. However, dashboards shared with non-ServiceNow users are static and lose their interactive functionality.
  
  Improving the scope for collaboration when using dashboards requires ServiceNow to be integrated with third-party dashboards.
  
  This allows organizations to make the information conveyed in dashboards more available around the enterprise, without purchasing additional ServiceNow licenses.
  
• Converting Home Pages to Dashboards: Even though home pages are prevalent, the transition to dashboards can enhance user experience owing to their superior features.
  
  To achieve this transition, users can visit their preferred homepage and opt to create a dashboard version if none exists. They can either create an entirely new dashboard or integrate it with an existing one.
  
  After converting a homepage into a dashboard, users can set it as the ServiceNow Home for easy access by choosing ‘Dashboards’ as ‘Home’ from the settings.
  
• Inform & Share: Once a new dashboard is set up or a homepage is converted, users should inform colleagues or other relevant parties.
  
  This ensures everyone is aligned and can access the newly available resources for better collaborative efforts.

Why Organizations Integrate ServiceNow Data with Third-Party Dashboards 

While the inbuilt ServiceNow Dashboards can be helpful, they come with certain limitations. 

• First, ServiceNow Dashboards are designed to display only ServiceNow data. This limits the full scope of visibility, and the dashboards do not reflect the insights of the wider enterprise. 
  
• Second, only users possessing a ServiceNow license can manage the Dashboards. This increases the TCO with the added burden of acquiring the right licenses for data access. 
  
• Third, ServiceNow Dashboards containing large data volumes (multiple variables)can negatively impact the solution’s performance. Data-heavy dashboards and reports slow down instances and queries, defeating the efficiency goals and degrading the scope of real-time intelligence.

Third-party dashboards typically provide all of the key functionality available in ServiceNow dashboards, including sharing dashboards and customization.

However, they also provide the following features and functionality:

Combine Data Sources, Improve Self-service Access and Democratize Data Across the Enterprise

Integrating ServiceNow with an external repository and third-party dashboard helps organizations eliminate these challenges and promote data democratization and self-service access. 

Organizations where stakeholders without ServiceNow licenses regularly require visibility into ServiceNow data benefit significantly from this. Rather than requiring additional ServiceNow licenses, an organization can extend access to ServiceNow data via systems that data stakeholders already have controlled access to. 

This also provides the added benefit of combining data sources for more in-depth analysis. 

Improve ServiceNow’s Performance

Leveraging third-party dashboards is also far more efficient than relying on ServiceNow Dashboards only. ServiceNow’s multifaceted solution has many business-critical functions that go beyond simply displaying data. 

These functions are impeded by dashboards that contain and display a high-volume of ServiceNow data. As the volume of data increases, dashboards take longer to populate and performance of the whole instance is degraded, impacting query speeds and usability of the whole platform.

By leveraging third-party dashboards, organizations can remove this burden from ServiceNow and improve the platform’s performance. 

How to Integrate ServiceNow Data with Third-Party Dashboards

Integrating ServiceNow data with third-party dynamic dashboards delivers real-time visibility into data across the organization – not just ServiceNow – and does so without impacting ServiceNow’s performance.

Organizations can integrate ServiceNow with third-party dashboards using DataSync, by Perspectium – trusted and official ServiceNow partners.

A ServiceNow-native application, DataSync supports massive throughput in extracting data from ServiceNow (over 1 billion records per month), making the application highly scalable for the end-user. 

The application provides complete control over how data is extracted from ServiceNow and replicated. Both manual and dynamic-based sharing options are available, allowing users to populate dashboards automatically and in real-time to ensure up-to-date insights are available.

Integrate ServiceNow Data with Third-Party Dashboards, with DataSync

DataSync is a no-code, integration-as-a-service solution, meaning unlike traditional integration approaches, implementation and maintenance by internal staff is not a requirement. 

The end-user interacts with the integration through the ServiceNow interface with which they are already familiar.

Perspectium ensures that the integration stays functional through new versions of ServiceNow, meaning updates won’t break the integration and impede business-critical functions.

Speaking to the pedigree of the technology, ServiceNow themselves are DataSync users, preferring the Perspectium integration method, to their own Rest-API enabled integrations.

Internally, the organization uses DataSync to extract data out of 10 ServiceNow production instances and replicate it into Snowflake data-stores for use and analysis by teams including HR, Marketing, Sales and more. 

ServiceNow users that also wish to enjoy the benefits of DataSync can request a demo today, or simply talk to us about your integration requirements.