good morning we're at the top of the hour so we'll go ahead and get started with with our performance analytics academy so welcome to performance analytics uh academy formerly known as office hours good morning good afternoon for everybody who's attending welcome if this is your first time and welcome back for a lot of the returning people that i see uh before we get into our our main presentation to kick off we have a few logistics to run through so first of all we want to emphasize that this session is for you we are here for you please ask questions um ask questions as we're going we'll try to answer them we'll follow up at the end our goal here is to give you some some fresh ideas and practical understanding of how you can apply some of these solutions into your your environment we are recording this session it'll be posted publicly when we're done and again with the qa q a please use the q a feature of zoom rather than chat because that allows us to make sure that we do get every question answered as as we're going my name is adam saud i'm an outbound product manager for now platform and now intelligence i am your host today and we'll try to answer some of your questions in in the q a uh thomas davis is presenting for us today another outbound product manager um and we're going to see one of some of his wizardry uh explaining some really complex topics very simply for us if you have to drop off early we will post this recording out onto the community and we'll be in youtube as well you have an opportunity to see all of our past sessions we have more than a year and a half of sessions for you to reference and if any of your colleagues missed it you can send them send them to this recording as well it'll get posted again either later this afternoon pacific time or early early tomorrow and you also get to see the schedule for the next few sessions so you can plan accordingly i also recommend subscribing to the youtube channel so that way when we do post it you'll get it pushed for those of us who can't come every every other week for our session and we do talk about some really deep subjects in here that you don't find in other places but there's also some great content if you're just getting started with performance analytics and reporting in now learning and you can get uh great starter classes and some advanced classes as well about performance analytics reporting and everything else servicenow also the knowledge labs from k20 are there um and then when we get into k21 those will be there as well and i want to advertise too uh those a lot of us do other things as as well with servicenow not just performance and linux and reporting so if if it applies to you there is a virtual agent academy similar to ours and a mobile academy that happened every other week the links are here if you search the community you'll find them as well sessions subject to this where they present you some things to think about and give you the ability to answer ask some questions all right and with that we're going to i'm going to hand it over to thomas uh to talk about how we can apply performance analytics on metrics applying two really uh fundamental features we have put them together and get even more value okay thank you adam can you see my screen looks great all right let me move this this always gets in my way there we go okay so um again like adam said today we're going to talk about uh symmetric information and um you know we'll give some information just about generally how metrics works and then we'll go into a couple uh demos to kind of show you them in action and then um you know some questions that you have metrics are one of those subjects that generally generate a lot of questions so that's good so hopefully i can get done fast enough that we can answer as many questions as possible um so let's see here all right so what is a metrics a metric excuse me a lot of you may know this already but basically a metric is going to uh calculate a measurement in time a duration uh how long something takes from one particular thing to another from for an example in an incident when it goes from one state to another if it goes from an assignment group to another if it goes from one assignee to another basically anything um that's inside of that incident that we can actually grab the field of we can determine how long it's it's been sitting in that particular uh state or you know further any of those other ones uh and then calculate a time for that and then of course we can put it into reporting or you can put it into performance analytics and today we're actually going to show it in performance analytics to show what you can actually do with it so again the biggest thing to understand is just if you if you need to uh have a duration of something between this and that then uh metrics is the way uh to go for that along with some other things that we'll talk about here in a little bit as well so uh with with metrics there's two important elements that you always have to um think about a definition a metric definition and uh that basically is deciding what it's going to uh calculate what it's going to get that snap snapshot of that duration of and you build those out and um and then you can use that further and in order to do that you you do have to have the metric admin role in order to do that and of course here is a document a servicenow document that will give you even more information but the big thing here is understanding the difference between a definition and an instance and then an instance is when there's actually something that has been grabbed based off of the definition itself so you would have multiple instances with uh within a definition uh multiple inside of incident if you were looking for one particular incident and it changing through the different uh states uh or you know like i said assignment groups and you would have an instance every time that actually triggered off so those are the two uh main things as it relates to what a metric is and how it works so um if metrics is not there available for you in your instance uh it should be it's generally coming um i believe out of the box now but if it's not you can always go to uh plugins and look for that and um and then you can look for all of the ones that um have come so all of these definitions themselves have been created and they're out of the box if you have the plugin installed and they're there for you and the easiest way to figure out whether or not they're there is to just go to the package and add that package to your definition and you'll see if it's a metric definition or whatnot because there are some different definitions that are out there as well but again if it's not if you're not seeing any of that then go and check and make sure that the plugin has been activated and of course that requires an admin role so metrics use database views and uh of course there are some that we have created a service now that are out of the box as well and generally these five in most cases not all cases will generally cover everything that is needed as it relates to metrics and again not everything but a good majority of everything so you can see these inside of your instance if you can um if you have that the role of admin you can see that those are out there uh again you don't have to have the admin role to access it from reporting or anything like that but if you actually want to see those metrics that um that have been created out of the box or if someone else has created one that you need to get to from the database view level then uh you would have to have admin in order to have that but again these are out there um and generally these will cover almost everything that's out there but you know you may have to do more but the biggest thing is to look for those before you go and decide to create something because these will most likely work for you so another part which doesn't necessarily tie directly to metrics but it's uh the biggest reason why it's in here is for you to also think of another avenue where you may not necessarily need to create a metric a lot of times when you know someone is trying to figure out if something's being met based on a duration of time or something like that that's really what uh solas are service level agreements so there are slas that are out there that of course come out of the box as well but you can also you know create service levels so if you also want to look at that duration and then say okay is that meeting a certain time limit that i have then probably slas are a better uh direction for you to go not necessarily thinking that you have to create a a metric so here of course is some documents that you can access and you do have to have the admin role to create those but there's also a really great um former performance analytics academy that was done by uh david who's on our team as well that actually shows um you know slas and you know doing breakdown metrics or whatnot on sla so i would definitely recommend that and that's really like i said when you're geared towards taking a duration of time and seeing whether or not it's met based on some agreement some sla or whatnot i would go and look that direction and make sure that the one there's not something there or get something created there as opposed to thinking that it ha it you know automatically has to be metric because even though those align pretty closely when you start looking at whether or not something is being done um in a certain amount of time based on some sort of agreement then you really want to go to sla and i wanted to make sure that i mentioned that in here so you would always have that in the back of your mind whenever you're deciding to go down whatever direction that you need so always remember the slas are there as well so um again i want to make sure that we get to the demos quick and then had enough time for uh questions and answers so at the end of the day that is the the gist of what metrics are how they work so let's get into some advanced sort of concepts as it relates to metrics and today we're going to look at the average duration of assignments and then also the average unassigned duration so how long is something assigned um you know between the different levels there and then also when something is unassigned what is the duration of when how long it's been unassigned so that's what we're going to look at today so for this first demo um again this is what we're going to look at these are the servicenow docs that you can access because of the different levels of this demo that i'm going to do so every every part of it has a correlation as it relates to a doc and these of course are the roles that would be required to do any one of these different parts of this particular demo so make sure that you understand that you have to have those you may already have those that's great but um that's important and so our use case here so we want to we want to gain better insight and easily identify if there are bottlenecks in the incident process with specific assignment groups so who has it longer who has it shorter is it going hopefully this can help you determine whether or not it's going to the right person the right or the right or group the right time and this will kind of help you uh because if an assignment group is sitting on it for a long time and it ends up being something that they can't do it's got to go to somebody else then hopefully something like this would help you figure that out so the first thing that we got to do is we obviously have to create an indicator source so what we're going to do here is we're going to go and create an indicator source and we're going to connect it to the incident metric table and that's the table that you would go to um to create any sort of indicator source that you need based on incident and here we'll just name that we'll give this a name and i personally uh and it really is whatever uh you want to do i don't like putting space as an indicator source it's just my thing so i always kind of separate there with a dot um and then the other big thing is you know given a description i'm really big on descriptions quite often people will leave them blank but i think it's important because that way somebody else doesn't recreate the will if there's already one that's out there then give them some help in the description letting them know what's there so they don't have to create something um new if it's unnecessary so make sure that you definitely fill in and hopefully you're a better typer than i am i'm not the best typer either so uh but just give that that information in the description there so once we have that then we'll actually go down and we'll grab our table again i'm not the greatest typer no judging on that so we'll go down and uh we'll pick the incident metric table and just simply just start typing an incident here and we'll find that and there it is right there and then we got to put in our conditions which basically match the description up above so we want resolved on today and then we also want to grab our definition right so this is what tells us which particular metric definition we want to use to grab our data and we want assignment group because that's what we're going to look at is the duration of assignments uh and then we also want to see when it started right i want to see started on uh or started is more than zero hours before resolved meaning that i don't want to look at anything that is resolved in this case or anything that is after resolved so those are the two the table in the list view and that's that's really all all it is into this particular example of setting up an indicator source for um our particular metric that we're going to look at so next this does call for a script and uh basically if you go to performance analytics and then find scripts you can add in scripts and we'll connect this script uh up to the incident metric table or up to i'm sorry the indicator source uh which of course is housing our metric table so just click new there and well actually this script is here and you'll have that because this is a sort of a common one that you can use uh and we'll talk a little bit more about what we're doing in the script on the next slide but here again you know we'll give it a name and then we make sure we want to give it a description of what it's actually going to do and this one's going to calculate uh the duration for the incident metric uh itself um and then again we want to go to our indicator source and that's what we're going to type in here and there it is and we grab that and then we'll just go to and we're going to add two or three fields i'm sorry so we're going to add our start and our end because that's obviously a big deal we want to know what those are and then also we want to add in um the result to see what is resolved or what not so you can add in as many as you need here as many that you plan on calling in your script you can add all of those uh directly here and then use them directly into your script and then we'll scroll down here and i'm gonna go ahead and just paste that in and um and that really is all that all it is of creating your script and now that script is attached to that indicator source so let's talk about uh the script a little bit so again it's here so you'll be able to use it if you want so again this is calculating the duration and hours between the two dates right um and the dates being when the assignment group uh changed that's what we're looking for and here the begin date the x date is always the start of the metric instant record so again an instance is created when something is triggered based off of a definition and then use the stop date for the duration calculation which is the y date so the end date can uh is from the metric instance but if it's not there and you want to use a resolve date from the incident you can it is there you can grab that as well and then if there is no date at all it will use the uh the calculation date which is the score end date of when it was actually pulled together so um this is some good information again this this script is uh very generic so it can all be it can also be used for open process records um anywhere else that you choose to you may have to do a little bit of um configuring on it but it is a pretty basic one and and that's what we're using that for so so next we need to generate us a uh indicator uh again pointing to our indicator source that we had and um this is probably familiar to you just of course go to the navigator do that and we'll click new and then we're gonna add in all of this information that i have over here to the left and we're going to put in our name and then our description which is actually very close i think it's the same thing as the name i decided so um and then you want to make sure that you set all these particular settings especially based on how you intend to look at that information in analytics hub or if you decide to put it into a widget so you know do you want it to minimize or maximize in our case here we won't minimize and we're going to be looking at hours and then we want to present precision of 2 and we'll add that there and then again we're going to grab our indicator source which is there and then our aggregate is average and we know it's scripted so here's where we would add in our a particular script that we created and i think that i forgot that and it's actually going to error out here when i submit it and we want it to publish on the analytics hub yep i forgot to do that so really good thing it's going to tell you when you forget to do that and there is our script there so we'll add that in and then we will save it again and we'll be good to go so that is adding our um indicator source and our script and setting up exactly how we want it to work so the next thing i want to do is i want to add a breakdown mapping to an existing breakdown so listen if you need to create a new breakdown then by all means create that but again um go and search and see if something's out there and this is a lot of demo data that's why you see so many assignment groups here but i know that it's going to be the first one that i have and then basically i'm going to go in here and now i'm going to create a mapping to the incident metric table as well so you saw that i had one to incident i had one to incident sla but of course i need to do one to the metric um as well and then i here it's going to be filled value which is what i'm looking at because in that definition that is the column which is assignment group that we're actually looking at and then of course i'm just going to go ahead and add the indicator that i just created um to that breakdown as well we'll move that over and we'll save and now we basically added a breakdown to um our indicator that that we're using along with to make sure that we have the mapping for that so now we have to collect some data so in this example here i'm going to create a new ph uh pa data collection job but again if you have an existing job i would recommend that if if it's good enough for it if there's not too many indicators that are already in it or if it's not pulling too much data but um if you can use something existing i would recommend that but i went ahead and created one here so we could go through the whole uh process so of course you got to give it a name and um then a description i don't know why they don't make description mandatory i don't think i'm gonna put that in so everybody has to do it um once i get finished typing here so i'm just basically gonna put here that this is used to collect data for um metrics and or incident metrics and uh and then we can start we can add our indicator into that and we can pull some data back so for this example because i want to make sure that i see a good amount of data or at least something that i can see i'm just going to go ahead and go back uh three months for our start and then of course the end will be one day ago which is what it already is um and then i'm going to put in a system administrator because i'll save this and then i don't need it active at this point because it's going to be uh on demand but if you had something daily which you most likely would want then you could definitely uh do that but for my case i made it on demand and then we save it and then we'll be able to actually go down and we'll add in our indicator that we created again and then we're going to execute that job and then you can see here on the slide down at the bottom i actually ran that job and those are the records that i got back so we'll move that over and we'll go ahead and kick that job off simple enough so probably something that you've done in the past but that's how we're going to add or indicate how you actually create a job and also add the indicator so now let's get some some validation that what we did was actually right so i'm going to go to the the analytics hub and i'm going to look for that indicator that i created to make sure that i have data and just search for it by name over here i didn't type it all out i just gave it a little bit it'll come back and there it is so we click on it and now we can see that we actually have some data at some point in time and of course it'll show records uh if you had a lot more records uh within that time frame then it would definitely show those and here you can see that my breakdown works um as well and if i click on one i can now see and i don't have that many points of of of time in my particular data so you may have a lot more data coming back when you actually do yours but again this gives you the ability to actually look at those durations uh in particular assignment groups of resolved incidents where it was sitting for an abundance amount of time or any sort of time that's above whatever threshold that you have decide is too long so um here's a good way of just looking at that and hopefully making some changes in whatever bottlenecks that are happening and uh change up that process so it doesn't take as long sitting in certain assignment groups so that again that's how you validate it so the next one is now we're just going to look at the average unassigned duration so how long is it actually unassigned as opposed to assigned sitting in an assignment group how long is it actually sitting unassigned and again here's some servicenow docs of everything that we'll be doing inside of this demo there is an additional step in the sense of we're going to create a formula indicator and bring this particular one that we've created and also the one that we just created bring those together and then we'll view that on the analytics hub and there are the roles that are required to do any one of those particular things that we're going to do it and real quickly so our use cases we want to identify if there's an opportunity to shorten the throughput time of incidents uh or an indicator is needed that tracks how long incidents are not assigned uh do not have an assigned to a person uh gain better insight and easily identify if there's any bottlenecks in the incident process that we can change with specific assignment groups so let's get into that as well so again everything's going to look very familiar we're going to create another indicator source and we will not have the same conditions in this one but we do need to create a new one and i'm taking forever here there it is and click on new again actually i'm going to use the existing one that we had because i love using insert and stay and hopefully that's something that you use so i'm just going to change the name up here um and then all i have to do is change um one or two of the conditions and do an insert and stay and i'm already done with my indicator source uh hopefully everyone on the call is familiar with what insert and stay is and you're using that make sure that you always change the name because it will insert another one with the same name if you did not change the name so make sure that you do that so here uh it's again it's resolved on today but our definition is going to be unassigned uh duration per assignment group and that is one that comes uh out of the box as well that is there for you so here we're gonna get rid of just the last um we're gonna of course change our definition to the one that we added in the description and it's right there and then i'm going to get rid of that last condition i'm not i don't have concern for that and then again go to the top banner right click insert and stay and voila we have our new indicator source um so very simple preview we do have some records again not a great deal of data in this particular instance that i'm using but that's how easy it is to create the next one and again like i said use the insert and stay if you're able to so we do have another script so we're going to go in and create us a new script for this one this script is is not as big and this script probably is very familiar this is one that is used uh quite often and uh we'll add that directly into our script and uh we're only going to use the start and the end field uh end fields i'm sorry for this particular one so again you always have to name it put a description in there i should really learn how to type faster um and then once we get that well of course we're going right back to um the indicator um source that we had before i'm sorry instant metric excuse me and then we're going to add in the start and end time there we go and then we simply just go down and we copy and paste in our new script which is going to help us get the information that we're looking for so again this will be in the slide deck and you can use this copy and paste this and use this as much as you need to so that's going to be our script for our next one of course we got to create an automated indicator as well and just like the previous we'll just go and we'll search for that and we'll create a new one and we'll name it appropriately there we go and this one is going to be the average average unassigned duration of resolved incidents and when we pull these two together in the formula indicator it really does give you great information to to make you know have action off of and actually make some changes if necessary so once we have that there i'll just copy the same thing and i'll put it into my description and then again we want this to be minimize and this is going to be hours as well and our precision will be 2 as well and then we're going to go and look for the indicator source that we created and there it is that second one down there all that type in and it had already popped up for me there we go and again it's an average uh check script and then we're gonna that'll be our value when nil is zero and then we'll put in our script that we created and there it is again and we will select publish uh on the analytics hub and then we'll right click at the top banner and click save and because uh we know that we're going to have a breakdown we'll go ahead and do that and we'll add in that same assignment assignment group breakdown and we'll go ahead and move that over and we'll click save and then of course update and we've created the automated indicator that we need so again new indicator source new script create an automated indicator off of it add it in our breakdown we don't need to do the mapping again remember we did that in the previous so we can just use that same assignment group so again like i was saying now we want to actually create a formula indicator that combines both this uh indicator that i just created and then the indicator from the previous demo so we'll go in here and we'll name this percentage of resolution time incidents are not assigned and then again for the description we'll just put shows percentage of resolution time that incidents are not assigned to a person and again hopefully this will give you you know some good information that you can draw action from and again we want this to be minimize and then now our unit is going to be percent rather than hours uh precision is still two we're going to check the key and then we're going to go down and now we're going to add in our indicators so we're going to search for the first one that we created or actually the second one that we created we'll add that in and for our time series we're going to do a seven day running average so again we can just start typing there there's many different time series that you can use but for our case it's seven day running average and we'll hit select and then i'm going to put in a slash and then we'll go in and we'll add in the next one and we'll do the same thing we're just going to add in the the next indicator and then give it the same time series to make sure that they match up seven day running average and because it's a percentage i'm going to go ahead and get multiplied by 100 there at the end and of course we want to publish this on the analytic sub definitely and then we also want to make sure that we give we're going to right click and save so we can then also add in our assignment group breakdown to the formula indicator as well we'll go ahead and do that there and then the next thing that we need to do because if you notice we didn't actually collect our data for our second indicator that we created so we need to go back and we need to do that so our formula indicator is um it's complete it's done it's there uh so now let's go actually collect some data so we can make sure that we see something when we go to the analytics hub to look at this data so again just look for data collection and what we'll do is we'll actually add it to that same job that i had already created um and i'll just search for it obviously i had the updated column in there i could have clicked on that and it would have been the latest one but there it is we'll go down to indicators and then we will add in the new indicator that we created the automated indicator that's inside of our formula and there it is we'll move it over and then we're going to run the job um again to make sure that we get some data so we'll execute that and then of course we'll go down and we will refresh that job log to make sure that we're getting data so it has started collecting and it is finished so now we know that we actually have data that we can actually look at so let's validate this and make sure that we're going to get something so again we're going to go back to the analytics hub and this time we're going to search for our formula indicator so again you can just search right over there so actually i searched for the um one of the formula one of the indicators that was inside the formula indicator so this i may have to actually do a live real quick because i just noticed that i didn't do the formula so let's do that real quick percentage of resolution there we go better okay now we can actually see the data so here are points in time when um these numbers are extremely high uh again it's based on the data that you have into your instance but these are times when the resolutions are um very high based on them not being assigned so you know you can look at this and again your numbers based on real data would probably look um much better so just keep that in mind when you're actually looking at it so again the percentage of resolution time that incidents are not assigned you can go in there and again you can click into that data and you know see the records or whatnot for any of that stuff so um again i apologize about that um there we go so he was able to see it so in conclusion after the little speed bump hiccup right there metrics are there and they're good for you if you need to look at duration of times based on when something is changing but again don't forget that solas are there as well especially if you want to look at that duration of time as it relates to some sort of standard or agreement or whatnot that you're trying to make sure that someone is adhering to slas is where you should do that the metrics are there for you so you can see whenever there's some things that are maybe going on inside of the process and you actually want to see the amount of time that it takes so just keep that in mind here are some servicenow docs that are out there that uh is all the information that we have right inside of the demo there's some um there's some community documents which are actually here and i didn't change that name there community docs that you can use and again it is the existing performance analytics academy that david david did like i said uh which is understanding the sla and metric breaks down breakdowns and of course there's some labs out there that you can use as well so a lot of information uh hopefully you were able to track through all of that creation that we did there but uh some really good stuff that you can probably use today if you're not already using these or it may stimulate ideas for you to maybe change or create some new things that you maybe haven't looked at uh before so with that questions and i think questions have been coming in yeah we got lots of questions for you so let's um group into a couple areas so we'll go through it the first one when you were talking about the indicator conditions indicator source conditions you had started more than zero hours before resolved right can you talk about why why that's important well first of all probably someone is thinking well how can a started happen um after resolved right and and basically we're looking at the the start time itself of whenever the instance itself was created for the definition so that means that if the resolved already happened then i want to make sure that i'm looking at any of those ones that were prior to that so a start date of when the actual instance the metric instance itself was created as anything prior to if there's a date that's on the resolved itself hopefully that makes sense and that answers your question and adam i don't know if you want to elaborate on that um well there's some i think it's correct but basically we want to ignore things that we know are bogus so somebody changed the assignment group after it was somebody retroactively went through and changed the assignment group the metric will still fire but i don't care you know once the incident's done very similar to why we have the script um the script logic that says if if something ended or didn't wasn't work resolved before the end date we're putting in some sanity to make sure that we just don't have data that will throw our our metrics way off that it's not meaningful so just be careful about that in general when you go through if you if you run into something where you shouldn't s you know created you can't change effectively but you can edit an incident after it's closed do you care um you know if you ever found an incident that had some data that was screwed up from some manual edit or a script where the end date was before the close date was before the start date you know i want to ignore those and there are cases where um i might want to ignore things that have that open and close within a minute of each other because that's going to bring down my averages quite a bit but it's some automated process that's doing it right so it's really important to be looking at at the data and scrutinizing it to go uh go click on show records and go yeah these are things i want these make sense make sure you're you're testing your analytics out with the records that are right there okay uh speaking of that one another one that came up uh when using formula indicators does it eliminate the ability to view records when drilling down into a particular metric do you want to address that one uh so we can go probably go unless you want me to show it directly um because of course we can try it unless we don't want the wrong thing to happen um you should you should be able to see the records um well it it's only when you drove them to the base records so that the formulas you you'll see on the formula indicator there's not a show records button because offensively we don't know what you want to see right i believe there's an idea in the idea portal about will just show me both um it's certainly something comes up but today when you use a formula um you don't see the records and it it's much more of a design issue than anything else because you have to figure out which ones you want to have and something if you had the idea that um i had the percentage percent of critical incidents open today well do you want to see the critical incidents or you want to see all the incidents open today which which records do we show um so it gets a little weird logic wise and and so today for formula indicators you can't see it but if you go into the um the base indicators then you then you will be able to see that and there's some some improvements in that in in quebec that are coming up but today generally if you see the formula you're not going to get to just see the records yeah and i and i i think i just i didn't i didn't hear that in the correct context i i was thinking they were saying would i still be able to get to the records the underlying records uh that makes up the formula which obviously you can just not right there so yeah right right you got to do a little bit of digging with you but you'll get there okay um there's one question that's a bit of a no no i'm going to chime in on this about metrics can be very useful but be aware they create a lot of data that's that's a good thing to acknowledge so metrics fire whenever that field is updated they they actually fire on every updated test to see if they're gonna get processed um but don't throw metrics in for things you don't care about out of the box we see things like assignment group that does you know that always matters assignment group always matters but don't put a metrics on everything for any reason um you know make sure it's something you want to have and one i think it's really valuable too with the metrics um and thomas i don't know if you want to bring up the metrics form uh one of the things an extra bonus right we were focusing on the analytics of it which is really important but uh in terms of user experience vetrix go to the metric definition form um you can add the metrics timeline and we didn't show the metrics timeline did you uh no i didn't no so if you go into uh instead it's just definitions yeah i forgot to put the s there uh and go into incident state duration is a good one number four oh i'm sorry number three so there is an option about timeline and can you go ahead and check the timeline box i don't know what this one's going to show us but hey let's do live demos yeah timeline at the top and click update and then go go into one of the metrics go into one of the incidents that was there you go back into it so this again this is a freebie if you check the box it shows up if you don't it doesn't go go to one of the records the incidents itself like incident number four oh i'm sorry that's fine and i i will i will add it to this we did uh thomas did in office hours before we talked about some relationships and adding related lists um metrics can be added to your incident related list as well with this with a uh system relationship but because we checked the box for show this on the timeline go up to metrics timeline and what this does is it will actually show you on in this graphical form for this incident who it was assigned to and how that how long that person had it how long was it in this state and how long that person had it now this is a very interesting one from some kind of bogus test data because it has empty great time to resolution for for so long but really interesting things that users can see right and i know it comes up that some managers want to really want to understand who had this incident for so long right i had a problem what's going on and the added benefit with metrics is i can see that not all metrics i want to show so that's why there's the the option to show on timeline or not but it's an added benefit that's in there and then we can add analytics on that as well so sorry for that duration but i wanted already to bring that up because it's a really nice feature to have and show all of it though is it is creating lots of data performance analytics scores are cleaned up regularly um there you set a retention the default's generally two years but it depends on the indicator source metrics don't have a retention setting out of the box that i'm aware of at least so you may want to put one in you may not um but just be cognizant that you're adding a lot of data the data by itself is okay but it can start to be a a large a large source of a lot large amount of data which then we have to worry about somewhere um okay another one came in and it's just about s a couple of a couple of men here about slas about business time and sla breakdowns and why do i use one or not the other and the answer is pretty much the same if you need business time business time is scary it scares me because uh for for me in my life experience thomas is in the east coast and i'm on the west coast so business time is different for us or is it not different is it is it the assigned to is it the caller what servicenow is based on the west coast is it always what is it always pacific time all these things are things you have to handle the way i like to handle them is sla breakdowns slas handle handle time zones really well you can figure you just simply go i want it based off of the caller's time zone i want it based off of the ci's time zone i want to based off of the assignment the sign assigned to time zone i can do those things i can pause i can handle holidays all that stuff i can do in slas so if i can use an sla breakdown which only works on assignment group and assigned to i want to use sla breakdowns because predominantly because they do business time so well and resets and pauses holidays all that stuff so if i'm doing assignment group or assign assign two i'm going to use an sla breakdown and configure an sla if it's not that it's state it's it's um a priority then i have to use metrics and generally i'm going to default to using calendar time because that's what metrics do you can configure them you can use a scripted indicator uh you can make sorry it's a scripted metric and you can do calendar time or sorry business business calendar time it just gets to be complicated um because you now have to tweak everything there's a an api class glide schedules i think so you have to define your schedule just like you would for an sla you can use the same one but you have to do some scripting to make it work and calculate the start time and end time i think metrics actually does have a business calendar field or business time field but it's not populated by default because you have to calculate it so if you need to do it you can i just generally don't and if i need to i'm lazy and if i want to do business time it's almost always going to be an assignment group and assigned to and in that case i'm going to use sla breakdown so hopefully that addresses your your questions about when do i use sla breakdowns and when do i use metrics and again if i can use breakdowns i use the sla breakdowns otherwise i'm going to use metrics as a fallback metrics i've been around near dawn of time they've been around for like 15 years sla breakdowns were introduced in istanbul i think so a long time but metrics predate them by by quite some some time that's why they're there okay yeah okay so another one came in thomas for you could so talk about metrics and the examples we have can can we implement a uh a metric for on hold duration so i want to understand the time spent on hold per assignment group okay so and that that is a field in the in the incident table um so so if i'm on the if when i'm in the on hold state right so i mean it's it's a state so as long as it is a state then yes you can track that you can and when you use the um the state of the incident itself it's gonna track and it's gonna it's gonna tell you all those states so when it goes from one to the next to the next to the next it's gonna give you that time that duration of each one of those states so you would just need to um find for the one the one for on hold and like adam said if you were using the metric timeline you'd be able to see that as well but you can absolutely um you know know how long a an assignment group is or an incident is on hold or whatnot absolutely it's just it's in another it's another state i'm going to add one one note to that so generally what we see is just states and duration states so how long an incident's on hold when you add in per assignment group metrics are done field at a time so i can do how long does this assignment group have it and how long is it on hold but not how long is it on hold per assignment group with the with the really simple duration metrics so when i do a duration metric you just pick the field and and you get it so that's what most of ours are they're really simple if you actually need the per assignment group on hold then you would need to script it so it's very very achievable um but you would do a duration well you just have to do it on on both because one of the things you have to be careful about is that it wouldn't be contiguous so states are there's always a state right an incident must be in a state it must have a priority that must have an assignment group even if that's empty and when one starts when one stops the other one starts but if you're doing on hold per assignment group that's not true right because if it changes assignment groups there's a new one it's still on hold but if it becomes if it goes from on hold to active then there's actually just no time so you need to handle that any script but the metric system will certainly work for it performance analytics will still work for it all the labs everything we went through will work but you are going to need a scripted metric to be a little bit smarter to know i'm tracking assignment group but this is only time that it's on hold and changing assignment group changes it as well as being coming on hold or coming off of on hold ah okay that's why you're here to back me up adam yeah it's that's i i read it well i read it wrong the first time it's when you want to do the both again metrics are based on one field if you are looking out of the box examples sdlc and sprint stuff does some really great examples for for for scripted metrics um some very advanced stuff that i can barely understand um but if you have a question like how would i write the scripted metric it's a great question for the community we have lots of bright people on the on the phone today and a lot and even more on the community so if you're not getting what you want throw it out there i'm trying this script am i getting what i want but what's what's awesome is that once you have that working everything else works the same performance analytics is going to layer on it regardless if it's a scripted metric or a duration metric um i've got another easy one so i'm gonna i'm gonna throw this out there about count distinct can you can you please explain how count distinct on a dot walk fee on how to do account distinct on a dot walk field um and then there's a question about cis we covered this one you're actually going to use a script um and we have a i believe the office hours or the the academy was on um descripting performance analytics that's actually a case where you use a script and as as we come through if you've heard me talk before i i hate scripts i'd never want to use a script many reasons performance can be a problem i can easily write a bad script i can make a typo in a script i can't make a typo once when i'm just selecting something from a choice list but when we look at the descripting and removing scripts from performance analytics the two valid scripts that i i i'm okay with are doing the one for account distinct so that there's an example in there of exactly how you do it and that's that's fine to use as a as a scripted indicator and then what what thomas showed for the metrics for that performance analytics script where we're using score start if i'm using score start or score end that is why we have scripts and as my plug because i'm going to take it if i'm not using score start or score end and it's not a dot walk field where i'm doing that you probably don't want to use the script um i i probably can achieve it with a database view or or some other something else but what we use today is absolutely the bright use of a performance analytics script and then dog walking fields to get account distinct is is acceptable as well um all right thomas if you want to scan through what what else works through i am going to one of the questions came in about how many lots of questions um how many breakdowns can we put in uh or what's the recommended number for that and i'm gonna show show everybody how we get into that okay are you gonna take the screen over i am going to take the screen over so i will steal it from you okay and i don't know what happened to that question but we're going to answer it um when we do talk about breakdowns and adding the new breakdowns um i want if you add more than 10 the ui will yell at you uh it will give you a warning saying you shouldn't put more than 10. that's fine it's a reasonable number but what we're actually looking for is not the number of breakdowns but the number of elements in those breakdowns the number of scores we're going to correct collect and when we get into it this indicator has four breakdowns it's fine it's it's gonna be fine i'm not gonna be worried about it but i could also have 20 and i could be okay and the way that i'm gonna look to go am i okay or not it has to do with a number number of elements so if i look at these there's only so many priorities there's only so many categories they're fine companies is i don't know how many they're going to be and assignment groups there could be a lot of assignment groups if i added a signed two that's a lot if i had caller lots of writing caller those worry me these ones don't and the way i look is should i do i actually be worried or not i go into manage breakdowns so you can edit and edit the m2m here and that's fine but manage breakdowns nice little ui that was added a couple releases ago so i could actually just drag and drop what's available what's mapped what's not what's not mapped it's very similar to the edit but a little bit nicer and what's really key here is to configure the breakdown matrix button down here so i went again from indicator i'm looking at any indicator is going to have this i'm going to click on manage breakdowns um i believe that's only going to show up if i have the matrix but uh like that could be wrong but we're going to look on that on the the breakdown so i have these four selected and what it tells me is how many values are in each of these so two i have 243 assignment groups five categories 182 companies and five priorities uh and over here i can see lots of fives and fours and they're all fine but when i click or click configure breakdowns what i'm able to do is i get this matrix that shows me all the priority assignment group possible combinations you will not necessarily get all of these but they're the possibilities and when i look at this what i need to get is not the 10 breakdowns but i need to stay under the limit is right around a million you actually can't you can only collect a million scores at a time um that's a big big number so i actually don't like being around there i want to be closer in the uh twenty thousand hundred thousand again it's possibilities so you won't see them all but i wanna still manage that so here i have forty four thousand possible combinations between company and assignment group that's high it's i actually i'm not going to get that many um so i'm okay with this but i can also come in here and just click on this and now i'm excluding that and that just added a breakdown exclusion and now this number is fine um and what this allows me to do if i come in here if i picked in like assigned to oh i'm gonna grab it the right way i'm gonna move assign two over here and now i don't know if you saw this my breakdown matrix went from forty four thousand to three hundred and fifteen thousand huge number um that's that's i'm a little uncomfortable with that um performance is gonna be an issue because i've gotta write those and i don't really need it so one of the things i might do is just go well i don't need assigned to an assignment group because those are inherent i can do a breakdown relation for it so i turn that off and now that number goes down uh quite a bit and i actually i'm not going to get assigned to in company because i don't care i do want to sign to in category i want to sign two in priority i want priority and assignment group but i just don't need to have those certain permutations and now i went from you know we went up from forty four thousand to three hundred thousand now at eleven thousand i'm perfectly happy with these numbers it's a very much of a distraction from where we're going from but when you're adding breakdowns that's the number i want to look at and i want to keep this number manageable i don't actually care how many breakdowns i have on my indicator i care about how many permutations are possible so even if ever you know even if we permeated through everything i'm still only going to have 11 435 scores about 36 because i have global okay so that was my distraction in that so thomas you have a chance to scan some more of the questions and what's the next one to answer uh yeah i actually had answered one directly um i'm trying to find the ones that are directly related to the office hours there is one and i don't know that we would have enough time to actually do it but is can you show how to apply a target on a metric at both the aggregated view in the analytics hub and to an individual breakdown itself um but again i don't know that three minutes is going to allow us enough time to to get into that um we did we did talk uh we had a session on targets right targets are the same whether i'm doing it once i'm in analytics up i can set a target and it doesn't matter if it's a formula uh it doesn't matter if it's automated it doesn't matter if it's external it doesn't matter where it came from that it's all the same right are there any differences to be aware of no i mean he didn't list anything out so that's a good point i mean once you once you've created everything and if you're using a metric in within your indicator itself and once you're in the analytics hub you can set targets on that so we should be able to do the same thing and hopefully that's what matt is asking unless he's tried that and it is not has not worked and if that's the case then then matt ask a question in the community and uh you can tag me or adam in it and we'll look to see if there's something else going on there great um and a couple other ones some other random ones that come through are not as related ones about widget security so widget security uh great great question widget security today is if you can add a widget you can add all if you can add a pa widget you can add all the pa widgets um and once you can see a dashboard you can see all the dashboard some of there's going to be some changes in there that you're going to be able to opt into uh coming in future releases possibly very very soon future releases um you're going to start seeing announcement well i take it back the the docs are already there for quebec so if you're interested today it is what it is um and i don't think it's going to get you exactly what you want without some customization but in quebec we're going to see some security changes which you can see in the release notes if you really want to put us on our toes go look at the release notes for quebec and you can ask us about some of that stuff in future office hours we will be doing some office hours covering covering those features after um quebec officially launches i think march 15th in the middle of march so we're absolutely going to be covering that stuff um but there are some security enhancements which you can see in the release notes now um [Music] and we got about a minute adam someone if you want to do the wrap up i think we'll go ahead and wrap that up we have the other questions we'll see if we can get back to you on those um but go ahead um and uh submit those or ask those in the community as well a lot of those stuff we should be able to help you with and just to wrap up where we are where we are at thanks thomas for for the intro and the metrics and applying pa on there um super helpful i saw lots of other comments about how people finding this useful for them um as we come through if you have any more questions or we didn't get a chance to answer it please post in the community there's some great guidelines about how we can help answer it so we can get a quick answer from us or from other customers and partners that are active in the community this session is going to get posted again we'll we'll post the future sessions the the outline for the next um next few sessions out there and you can access some of those we referenced them as we were going some of the really valuable ones and if you have a question you have something you'd like us to talk about please uh click on the link to the office hour suggestions and post those so we can we can provide prepare some office hours at the pa academies for you and until we're there ask your questions in the community um again screenshots are very very helpful the more you explain the better answer you're going to get catch up on the previous um performance the performance analytics academy and office hour sessions those are all there for you if you have an idea if we're not if you're not getting what you want right you have the answer you're not happy with it please submit the idea in the idea portal so as we're working on future releases and enhancements we're addressing what you really want them to do and take some training lots of great stuff and now learning and i always encourage you if you've exhausted all the the performance analytics training that's out there the reporting training expand out to predictive intelligence to fund a virtual agent to do the servicenow fundamentals so much great stuff out there for you take advantage of that and then if you haven't done the knowledge labs take those as well thank you very much for your time for joining us uh thank you thomas for a great presentation and we will see you in two weeks