Welcome to part 7 of the Builder series.
In this video, we’ll guide you through creating some basic reports and show how to add and arrange those reports as widgets on a dashboard.
This video builds on the use case from previous videos in this series...
... and can also be used as a standalone reference.
Luke Wilson, our Safety Manager, has requested some simple reports to help him keep an eye on his safety issue resolution process.
Here are his requirements:
First, he wants a pie chart to show the ratio of big to small category issues that are not complete.
Then, he needs a simple counter to show how many critical issues are currently active.
He’d also like to use some color coding as a visual cue.
Green for no critical issues, orange for 1 or 2, and red for 3 or more.
Let’s get started!
We’re already logged in to our ServiceNow instance with the admin role.
Users with the delegated_developer role who’ve been granted the File Type Access to Reporting for this app...
... can also perform the tasks shown here.
We navigate to Safety > Issue > All…
… And start by creating a quick filter to display only the issues we want to report on.
In this case, we want to exclude issues that are complete...
... so we find one whose state is complete, right-click it, and select Filter out.
We can add other quick filters by right-clicking a value in any field and selecting Filter out or Show Matching.
Or we can use the filter tool to provide a set of conditions.
But for now, we’ll just use this simple filter where the state is not complete.
Next, we open the Category context menu and select Pie Chart.
This generates a pie chart representing all active issues, grouped by category.
Now all that’s left is to configure the report details.
Let’s change the title to something meaningful.
Clicking Run updates the report.
Then we save our changes.
And here’s how we share this report with the safety team.
Click the Sharing icon, click Share, make it visible to Groups and Users...
... and then select the group and click OK.
One down.
Now let’s take care of Luke’s other requirement:
The color-coded counter to show how many critical issues are currently active.
Instead of starting from the list this time, let’s build this report from scratch using ServiceNow Studio.
To open Studio, we navigate to System Applications > Studio and select the Safety app.
Here in the header, we click Create Application File.
Then we select Reporting as the application type and Report as the application file type, and click Create.
This tool walks us through the report building process step-by-step.
We’ll name this report Active Critical Issues…
…Set the Source type to Table…
…And select our Issue table.
That defines where the data comes from.
We click Next to continue.
Here’s where we define the report type.
We’ll scroll down to the Single Score and select that, and then click Next.
The report is already showing a count, so there’s nothing to configure here. We just click Next.
On the Style tab, we could change the color to always be red by using the default color.
But instead, we’ll start with green...
... and then advance to orange for one or two issues and red for three or more.
First, we’ll set the default color to green and save our work so far.
Next, we’ll click Edit Coloring Rules.
And here’s where we create a new rule to tell the system...
... when the count of critical incidents is between 0 and 3...
... we want the color to be orange.
Here, “between” includes values between the end points, but not the endpoints themselves.
After we submit that rule, we create a second one, saying...
... when the value is greater than or is 3...
... set the font color to Red.
We click Submit, and here are our rules.
The last task is to narrow down the count.
Currently it includes all issues...
... so let’s filter the report by applying these conditions:
Priority...
...is Critical...
... and State is not Complete.
Then we run it again and show the count of just the records we want.
That looks pretty good, so let’s save it and share it with the safety department.
Now to make a dashboard that contains these two reports.
We’ll do this through the classic UI.
We navigate to Self-Service > Dashboards…
…And create a new dashboard.
In the form, we give it a name and click View dashboard.
To add reports, we click the add widgets icon...
... select Reports...
... and click our first report, Active Critical Issues.
After a quick check to make sure we got the right report, we click Add.
When it’s on the dashboard, we can resize it by dragging the lower right corner.
Clicking this arrow takes us back to the reports widgets...
... where we can select our other report using the same method.
A little resizing and reorganizing, and we’re done with the Add widgets panel, so we’ll close it.
The nice thing about this dashboard is that it represents live data and is interactive.
For example, clicking the slice of the pie representing the big issues displays the list of records in that category.
And, as long as we have proper entitlements and access, we can examine the underlying data.
That’s it.
With a few clicks, we can create additional reports and add them to the dashboard.
For more information, see our product documentation, knowledge base, or podcast.
Or ask a question in the ServiceNow Community.