Integrating ServiceNow with Business Intelligence Solutions

Integrating ServiceNow with Business Intelligence solutions can help organizations extract more insight and value from the platform.

ServiceNow is widely known as an IT service management platform, designed to streamline workflows, automate processes, and improve operational efficiency.

While the platform provides some built-in analytics and reporting capabilities, it is not a full-fledged business intelligence (BI) solution.

It offers basic reporting tools, but for organizations looking to extract deeper insights, advanced analytics, and visualizations, integrating ServiceNow with a dedicated BI solution is often necessary.

ServiceNow and Business Intelligence: FAQ

Is ServiceNow a Business Intelligence Solution?

No, ServiceNow is not a BI solution in the traditional sense. While it offers basic reporting features, such as dashboards, performance analytics, and predefined reports, these are relatively limited compared to the capabilities of dedicated BI tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Qlik.

ServiceNow’s reporting features are mainly focused on IT service management data, and they may not provide the depth, customization or ability to leverage third-party data sources required for more complex cross-platform reporting and analysis.

Does ServiceNow Support Any Integrations with BI Solutions?

Yes, ServiceNow does support integrations with BI solutions, most notably through its Integration Hub and spokes. The Integration Hub is a tool within ServiceNow that allows users to connect and exchange data with various third-party systems, including BI platforms such as Power BI, Tableau, and others.

These integrations can help streamline the transfer of data for reporting and analytics without overwhelming the ServiceNow platform – although the process spoke integrations use to extract data from ServiceNow can cause performance issues with high data volumes.

Via predefined spokes, the Integration Hub aims to provide the ability to integrate ServiceNow, without requiring integration development experience.

However, organizations often require developers to customize existing, or build their own spokes to suit their particular requirements.

Are There Any Third-Party Solutions or Services Available for Integrating ServiceNow?

Yes, there are several third-party solutions available for integrating ServiceNow with BI platforms, and these can be broadly categorized into two types: point-to-point integrations and publish/subscribe integrations.

Point-to-point integrations

Point-to-point ServiceNow integrations integrations refer to solutions – typically API and ETL based – that connect ServiceNow to a particular end-point. This means that if an organization wants to replicate ServiceNow data within multiple end-points, they will need multiple integrations.

Tools like MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, and Jitterbit offer API connectors to extract data from ServiceNow and push it into BI tools.

Similarly, ETL solutions such as Informatica and Talend allow organizations to extract datasets from ServiceNow, transform them as needed, and load them into a data warehouse or BI system.

While these integrations are effective for many use cases, they can become complex and significantly degrade ServiceNow’s performance when dealing with large volumes of data or multiple end-points.

This is because such integrations rely on the same web-services layer as users to retrieve data. This means integrations must compete for system resources against users and even other integrations, and the accumulative strain this puts on ServiceNow can impact performance and query speeds significantly.

Publish/subscribe integrations

For organizations dealing with large-scale data or requiring near real-time data synchronization, Perspectium offers a publish-and-subscribe solution.

Perspectium’s solution efficiently handles high data volumes and ensures data is consistently available for BI tools, providing a more scalable and seamless integration compared to traditional point-to-point methods.

This approach replicates ServiceNow data in real time without impacting the performance of the ServiceNow platform.

It achieves this by using push technology to replicate data within a message broker. The message broker – not ServiceNow – then distributes data to target systems.

As push technology operates on the platform side, it is far more efficient at sending data out of ServiceNow.

Additionally, as the message broker is responsible for distributing data, Perspectium can feed multiple targets simultaneously without any additional strain on ServiceNow.

What’s the Best Method for Integrating ServiceNow with BI Solutions?

The best method for integrating ServiceNow with a BI solution depends largely on the organization’s specific requirements.

For smaller volumes of data or relatively simple use cases, API or ETL-based integrations might suffice.

These solutions allow for the flexible extraction and transformation of data, but they may not be ideal for handling large data volumes or ensuring real-time replication.

However, for organizations working with massive datasets or needing to continuously synchronize data between ServiceNow and BI platforms, a more specialized solution like Perspectium’s publish-and-subscribe model offers significant advantages.

Perspectium’s solution is designed to replicate large amounts of ServiceNow data without impacting system performance, making it the best choice for businesses looking to maintain high availability while supporting powerful BI analytics.

Conclusion

Integrating ServiceNow with a Business Intelligence solution can greatly enhance your ability to analyze and report on critical business data. While ServiceNow provides some analytics capabilities, the full potential of its data can be unlocked through integration with BI tools.

Whether through API-based or ETL-based integrations, third-party services offer a range of options for connecting ServiceNow to BI systems. For organizations handling large data volumes or requiring real-time synchronization, Perspectium’s publish-and-subscribe data replication and integration solution stands out as the most efficient and reliable method.

By offloading data integration tasks from ServiceNow, Perspectium ensures performance remains optimal, while providing comprehensive, timely insights through BI solutions.

If you’re looking to for a high-volume, high-performance ServiceNow integration solution, talk to us today!