Understanding Reports & Report Types

If you present your weekly performance to team leads but are tired of manually analyzing records and tickets in ServiceNow, start using ServiceNow reports. They help automatically handle workloads, can be scheduled for every Monday, and can be emailed directly to the leads. 

Don’t get confused; let us understand what exactly ServiceNow reports are and the different types of reports you can access. 

What are ServiceNow Reports?

ServiceNow reports represent stored data as visual charts, scorecards, tables, and graphs. They help managers, stakeholders, and process owners identify performance, system analytics, KPIs, and operational activities. There are different components of visualization of a report, including: 

• Header and Footer: It helps you define the title area and outline of the visualization. It is used to define the report’s appearance and has nothing to do with the values or data. 
• Data Section: It ensures which records are taken from which table and how they are configured. You can edit and manage the data sources, metrics, and filters within them.
• Data updates: It allows ServiceNow to refresh data and decide when a chart gets new data. 
• Presentation: It controls how widgets look on the dashboard. You can set the colors, font style and size, layout, and icons. 
• Drill-down/Interactivity: It controls what happens when a user clicks into a chart segment or list row.

With all this, you also get to pick from the different types of reports. 

What are the different types of Reports? 

In ServiceNow, there are multiple report types used to manage your data. This is where you get to choose how your data will look to the user. 

1. List Reports
2. Pie Chart Reports
3. Bar / Column Chart Reports
4. Line Chart Reports
5. Area Chart Reports
6. Pivot Table Reports
7. Single Score / Metric Reports
8. Heat Map / Treemap Reports
9. Calendar Reports

Choose from different report types based on use cases, such as sorting and grouping columns, creating slices for details, comparing volumes across groups, showing comparisons using multiple series, multi-dimensional analysis, and much more, with the ideal report type. 

What’s Next? 

When choosing among these different report types, it is important to understand how each report is created and published. Also, understand how to schedule reports according to your preferences.