Designing a Dashboard

in ServiceNow

8 min readApr 24, 2021

I started my professional journey as an SDE intern at one of the Tech Giants: Dell Technologies. So far, my work has mostly revolved around Data Analysis and creating attractive and robust dashboards. During my internship I was introduced to this amazing platform called ServiceNow that has some awesome features like asset management, script writing, customer service management, and of course the Dashboards.

I am a big productivity fan and am always on the hunt for content-specific, first-hand experience-based articles rather than wandering in the jungle of documentations. However, when I started with my projects, on ServiceNow, I could not find any.

So, here I am at your service trying to deliver, beginner-friendly content on creating ServiceNow dashboards.

Today you will be served the following menu:

What Is Data Analysis?
What Is A Dashboard?
Why Do I Need A Dashboard?
How Do I Start With A Dashboard?
How Do I Add Widgets To A Dashboard?
How Do I Construct A Report?
How Do I Move Dashboards In Different Instances?

What Is Data Analysis?

According to Google:

Data Analysis is the process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making.

In short, it is just like a person analyzing all the scenarios before buying a new TV for himself/herself.

Now you must be wondering why am I talking about Data Analysis when the heading of the article is related to Designing?
Well, you will be kind of surprised to know that Data Analysis and Designing a dashboard walk side by side. Ever heard of Data Visualization? If not, no worries I got your back.

Data visualization is a way to view the data analyzed in the form of charts, graphs, and more. It gives us a more clear picture of how good and clean the data is.

Various platforms allow an individual to visualize their data and one such platform is ServiceNow. It is a platform for digital workflow revolution which delivers a smarter way to workflow across industries. Under ServiceNow, we get one such option of creating dashboards.

What Is A Dashboard?

Dashboards are drag and drop canvas organized by tabs and widgets for gathering visualizations which helps clients to acquire knowledge on the health of the system.

Why Are Dashboards Important?

It provides a holistic view into the quality of data using completeness, correctness, and compliance scores. If a company has adopted the ServiceNow platform then the Executive leadership likes to understand the data with high-level metrics which is provided by such dashboards. It helps clients understand what areas might have a gap in the process and how can they improve.

Now, Let’s Begin!

How Do I Start Creating A Dashboard?

Go to the navigator on your instance and under performance analytics select dashboard
Click on the new button to create a new dashboard.

3. A new page will appear which will ask for you to do the necessary configurations like

Name — provide the name of the dashboard
Group — assign a category to the dashboard which will place the dashboard in the dashboard selection list. You can leave it blank but confirm it from other developers before doing so.
Order — Order the dashboard appears on the dashboard landing page and pick lists
Restrict to roles — You can give edit user roles to different groups or a specific user by searching the name in the box and selecting it. Again, if you are not sure ask your business manager or a peer developer to guide you on the same. I would suggest not to leave this one blank even though it is not mandatory unless it is an individual project.
Active — Select to make the dashboard usable in runtime.
Owner — By default, your name will appear in the owner box so just go with it.

4. Now after doing all this click on the submit button.

How Do I Add Widgets To A Dashboard?

On the top right corner you will see a plus ‘+’ sign, this is used for adding the widgets or shall I say the reports. Click on it
A pane will open where you will be able to see different options like favorites, reports, interactive filters, and more.
Since for now, we are focusing on reports click on it and you will see all the reports appearing. Now you can search for yours which you want to add and just click on it. But rather than going under reports, one could find his/her reports in favorites also, given that he or she had put the report under favorites. It only saves time by putting your reports in that category.

Now after clicking on the report you will see an option to add it, click on it and it will pop on your screen.

You can customize the layout of your dashboard by clicking on configuration. There will be different layout options, you can choose anyone and after clicking on it, the widgets will appear in that layout. You might have to manually adjust some widgets.
You can also choose a background color for your dashboard from the dashboard background section. The default color is #ffffff (white). Enter the hexadecimal value for color or use the color picker to select a color.

You can also edit your widget by clicking on the edit widget. Enable/disable real-time updates, enable/disable borders and titles, set the title alignment, and tie the widget to an interactive filter, these are the options that you get and you can set them according to you or the demand.

One can resize the widgets or drag them to move to a specific location.
If you want different sections under the dashboard you can display it by creating tabs and adding the right reports in those tabs.

Brace yourself to checklist another item from the MENU!

How Do I Construct A Report?

If Dashboard is a canvas then report is your art and together they form a painting. Reports are the small pieces of information in the form of charts which when placed together on a board give a more clear view into the data of the system.

Without further ado let’s see how a report is formed!

Search for the report in the application navigator and select create new from the options
A new page will appear with 4 sections

Data

Mention the name of the report
From the source type, you need to select according to your analysis whether you will be collecting the data from a table or a Data source
For both, you will have to mention the name of the table in the next box

Type

This gives you a variety of options in terms of how you want to represent your data e.g. bars, pies and donuts, time series, and more.
According to your problem statement select anyone and click next

Configure

Group By

Under group by you will get different attributes/column names of the table you selected at the beginning. For eg., if a report is grouped according to data quality then all information that belongs to servers, applications, telecom, load balancer will be placed in separate groups.
Feel free to select “Additional Group By” fields according to your use case, from Additional Group By.

Aggregation

is for performing mathematical calculations on the records present in the table. You can either sum, count, or average the data according to your demand.

Style

Want to customize your report?

Explore the different features provided in the style section here: Bar and horizontal bar reports (servicenow.com)

Your end result!

How Do I Move Dashboards In Different Instances?

So, before we get started with this section I have some questions for you:

Were you ever curious about how companies are handling big projects? What kind of management or strategies do they use? What’s the secret behind such easy deployments?

Well, that secret ingredient is the SCRUM. Scrum is a framework for project management that emphasizes teamwork, accountability, and iterative progress towards a well-defined goal. The developer starts with his/her script in DEV, completes it and passes it on for testing. Where the tester performs the functional QA and shifts it to UAT. User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is where your Process Owner or the manager who generated the demand tests it and after all the sign offs are done, the project is deployed. Now for all these stages, different environments/instances are provided in which the developer moves his/her work for testing.

Coming back to our main question — How to move the dashboard in these environments?

Many developers won’t know this and while moving their update sets/projects they will notice that the information which they added in the DEV env did not reflect in TEST and UAT.

Well Developers keep a note of the steps I am about to tell you now!

Go to your dashboard and click on the hamburger button present in the top left corner.
A drop down will appear and then select dashboard properties
Right, click on the toolbar and you will see an option of ‘Unload Dashboard’ just click on it and surprise surprise all your dashboard information including the widgets will be captured.