good morning good afternoon and good evening welcome to performance analytics and reporting office hours uh thank you for taking your time out of your day to join us these sessions are for you um these are intended to give you some new insight some visibility into some existing functionality and help you push the limits of what you can do with analytics and your servicenow instance uh we're here to to provide some fresh ideas and give you some some practical guidance so as we go through today we're going to be talking about things that that everybody can do that are in your instance today not new features but something we want to make sure that you're you're looking at uh as a reminder these are recorded so you can go back and listen to these uh if uh i don't think we'll bring anybody out from you but if we do uh understand that we are recording this if you're uncomfortable please let us know uh that uh if you ask a question not to take you off mute um and if you do have a question please uh use the q a at the bottom uh in zoom we do see the chat um and you can use the chat but the q a helps us make sure that we're we're able to respond to every question we don't miss anything if we use the chat it can get it can get lost as we go so we highly encourage you to use the q a as we're going don't wait till the end just if you have a question go ahead and put in the q a if we answer it later you can always dismiss it um but that way again we can make sure we address everything and can follow up if we don't get to your question while we're during the presentation so today uh we have myself adam stout as the host i am here to walk us through and get us started and we'll close up at the end our speaker for today is thomas davis uh we're both outbound product managers for the platform and now intelligence you've you should have heard from us before uh you'll hear from us again as i talked about these are recorded if this is your first time here uh you're welcome um we have all of our previous sessions available in the community where you signed up for this um if somebody forwarded you the invite if you go into the servicenow community you can find our session find the page on office hours in the analytics intelligence and reporting forum you can subscribe so you find out about our new sessions that are coming up you'll see the schedule and you'll be able to go back and get all the previous recordings and not just the recordings but the decks and a little bit of a understanding about what's going on great information there so if you if you do miss a week i recommend going back we're going back for it if you want to you can subscribe to the youtube playlist until again if you miss it uh you'll you'll find out we post that post the links for those the youtube recording generally gets posted later today or or tomorrow um but again all those are back if you if you need and as we're going we are talking about some specific functionality that comes in but there is some great uh functionality that is covered in now learning if you are new to servicenow if you're new to reporting if you want to learn some more and go further we highly recommend that you go visit now learning lots and lots and lots of free self-paced training for you the knowledge labs are still there so i encourage you to go there and really get some hands-on experience with servicenow with performance analytics amazing content there most of it's free for you self-paced you get the instances you can you can really get some more hands-on experience and take it further than what we're doing in each of our office hours and also in the community it is a great place to ask questions we're going to open up the session once we're once we're through the main presentation for your questions about what we talk about today but also anything else related to performance analytics and reporting if we don't get to it or you don't want to wait two weeks uh post something in the community this article that you can find if you search for it uh or you'll see the link here it's just got some great resources about how you can get a good answer to your question so if you're new to posting in our community i recommend reading through this if you follow these guidelines you're going to get a good answer very quickly and if you don't it's sometimes more challenging to get the answer that you're looking for okay and now we are gonna i'm gonna turn it over to thomas davis uh who's gonna talk to us about uh how to use spotlight and what you can do with it all right adam thank you let me share my screen here let's make sure that i'm sharing the right one okay you can see my screen yep looks great awesome all right here we go so again thank you adam my name is thomas davis and i'm sure you all have heard from me before and like adam said you'll definitely hear from us again uh but i am an outbound product manager with on the now intelligence team and today we're going to talk a little bit about spotlight and then kind of look at what we can how we can look at a process to target target processes with actual spotlight itself so um there are videos that are embedded into the slides here so if the videos are moving fast that's not me actually at this point i did create the videos but just understand like adam said before all of this will be put out uh on the community uh in the community for the this particular office hour so if you're not able to follow along and it moves uh relatively fast in the videos no worry you'll have it to yourself where you can actually watch those videos within those slides again and start and stop so you can if you want to use them um as maybe you're creating something in your own instance so just know that i'm not moving that fast as i'm actually talking those are pre-recorded uh but again they'll be there for you all right so uh what's the agenda today so first we're gonna talk about what spotlight is uh and then we're gonna help you know you all try to navigate your way through spotlight and some of the things that you need um or to take you know really good eye to uh when you're actually looking for things or troubleshooting anything with spotlight so we'll show you some of the things there as it relates to that and of course we'll do a spotlight uh demo at the end so what is spotlight so spotlight essentially it just enables you to prioritize work uh based on multiple weighted and quickly identifiable high priority tasks so if there is particular things that you know or your business has decided it is worth much more value than something else spotlight gives you the ability to wait those things so they will actually show up um in the in spotlight so you can seek those things out see those things and actually have them visible to you and we have a business use case that we'll talk about a little bit later but again it just gives you the ability to take uh use cases that you have in your own business and make sure that you're you can await them appropriately so you're actually able to find those and and drive actions within your business so um the criteria that you create is based on again what you've decided and we'll talk about criteria a little bit more here in a minute uh but here is a a document that's right here that actually talks about you know setting up spotlight but we're gonna actually show you how to do that as well today so this is how it would work uh if you were gonna go ahead and set up a spotlight so the first thing that you you would have to do is create a spotlight group um and it's just a set of table records that you want to evaluate and rank for importance the records must be associated with an indicator uh and then you have criteria so it specifies the records you want to value by creating a um an actual criteria that you associate to the group right or to a particular criteria within the group so the group itself looks at a particular indicator and then the criteria says okay when i look at this uh indicator there are specific things that i want to look at you can set up the criteria based on breakdown so if you have a breakdown that's associated to that particular indicator you can add that into the criteria to look for those a specific breakdown within that indicator or you can just query the indicator itself maybe there's something that you want to look at that's not within a breakdown so you just there's particular things that are associated with the indicator itself that you want to to look at maybe user information or something like that so it gives you that ability to to do that and then once you have all of that created your group and your criteria based on what you want to look at within the group then it'll actually show you the scores after it's actually been uh executed so you can do a manual execute on a spotlight group if you choose to but it also is set up uh daily it's run one time uh once a day to actually gather all up gather all of those spotlights up so then you can actually see them on the spotlight dashboard and then also the internet interactive analysis uh that spotlight provides as well so these are the steps and we'll get into a little bit more detail about that here shortly so just some housekeeping so before you start to work with spotlight an administrator must activate the spotlight plug-in when activating spotlight consider activating one of the analytics and reporting spotlight solutions that are already out there first see whether one of those solutions already covers your business use case and then secondly if you still need to create a spotlight group or spotlight criteria um an analytics and reporting solution can be a useful template so you can actually use one of the existing ones that are out there but just understand in order for you to use spotlight in general it definitely has to be activated by an administrator within your instance itself and then you can install those things and then you can go you can move forward with uh spotlight so again here in the video we're actually showing how that process would work um and again you can go back to that video if it moved too fast for you so spotlight guided sight ups setups so this is a great feature within uh the platform itself even outside of spotlight uh just in general uh guided setups are a great way to actually become familiar with what is actually inside of a particular thing and in this case we're talking about uh spotlight so you know you can go through all of that and it'll actually show you the spotlight groups the criterias the jobs that are associated with it um everything that is sort of associated with that so if you're very new to spotlight and again this works for anything else that has guided setups within the platform itself this is always a great way for you to become familiar really fast with all of the things that it takes to actually run a specific claim specific thing and in this case as we're talking about uh spotlight so if you can utilize the guided setups i would definitely recommend doing that for spotlight and then anything else that's out there as well so spotlight interactive analysis so this shows the key results of a spotlight job so it accesses the analysis from a spotlight group that's been created again maybe one that was already out there or one that you yourself have created and uh it actually gives you the ability to see those things uh directly right there on an international interactive analysis uh form there so there is a spotlight dashboard that is out there that comes out of the box as well but this is another way that you can uh actually see that information uh relatively fast directly from the spotlight group itself so um so quick note it uses this uh used as a spotlight database view so spotlight creates database views for each spotlight group when you create the group if the database view is missing a warning appears and you have to have the pa spotlight admin roles a link also appears generating for you to generate the database view itself so if the database view has not been generated and you end up getting an error on your interactive analysis it will provide you with a link a related related link to actually generate that database view if you have the pa spotlight or an admin role so just be wary of that so you know that maybe that may happen to a user of yours they may get that error and that is a quick um indication that you need to go in and create that database view and again it would take an a an admin or a pa spotlight role so here we are talking about the database views so spotless ensures that database view joins the spotlight table in the facts table where whose record records a spotlight group whose records that the spotlight group evaluates so again going back to the indicator that it's going to use at that group um spotlight group level the spotlight itself will create a view where it will join the spotlight tables with that indicator so it will then be able to give you the results that you're looking for so after creating a database use spotlight adds in a reference to it and then the related spotlight group record and um spotlight group table the reference consents of primary keys field for the database view which is in a database view column of the record so again we talk a little bit more about the generate database view that is there but just know that all of the information that is behind spotlight is derived from a database view that is created once you've created your group and criteria and actually runs run the job itself on there you can get a little bit more information there is a servicenow dock that actually talks about the database view itself so now we kind of went through some of the housekeeping and you know talking about you know the database view the interactive analysis um what you need to do the steps that you need to do to actually create a spotlight so now let's actually look at uh creating one so our use case um and again this may not be a use case for you you may have your own use cases but um you know understand that if it's something that definitely needs to be highlighted and weighted uh spotlight is a place that it should be so our use case is we need to know when we have any p3 incidents where the caller is a vip and what is the focus of those incidents so um are those incidents being worked are they not being worked how long have they um been out there um why is someone not jumping on it with it being a vip uh so those are kind of things that we want to try to get out of creating the spotlight uh on this particular use case so the first thing that we have to do is we have to set up a spotlight group like we've talked about before and check and see if what first we should check and see if what we're looking for in our use case is already in the spotlight criteria so here you can see in the filter navigator i searched for spotlight group uh and then i clicked on the incident uh spotlight and now i'm scrolling through looking for is there anything there that that already works and in this case there's not so i'm going to create a new one uh and we just named this p3 vip and then um again because it's not there's not a breakdown associated with it i'm going to select query and then i'm just going to set my condition directly there so i'm going to look for where priority is 3 moderate and then also look for where the caller itself is vip so understand i don't have to put in a state uh because the indicator itself that the incident spotlight group is using is already looking at number of open incidents so we know that they are open incidents so there's no need for me to actually put that into the condition itself and i'm just going to go ahead and give it a weight of a thousand um and then you hit submit and now it is out there and if we scroll down a little bit well i hit launch um but uh if you scroll down in that list it'll actually show you that it's sitting there so that's the first step that we want to do we just want to create that that spotlight criteria inside of the existing incident spotlight group and that's what we've done there so continuing a little bit more so now what i need to do is i need to go ahead and execute that and i executed by clicking on that button and you can have the uh related list here but this one was scrolling so if you'll notice here so it's it's collecting and it collected and we have numbers um and basically the numbers that were there are the same so now that we know that we've kicked it off we're going to look at our interactive analysis so what we have to do is we have to look in our list and see if we can actually see any of those now based on the scores that are out there uh there's there's maybe 1 000 wasn't a high enough weighted uh i i believe that the first one there is it is a p3 but i don't know if it's necessarily a vip or whatnot uh and then mine the one that i set up at a thousand it just isn't jumping out at me so i think that we might need to actually weight that a little bit higher so it'll actually you know jump out even more so if i go down into the list here i can find that p3 and then i can just double click directly here in the form and i'm going to change that to 2 500 which is kind of broad again these numbers really come down to what your use case is but for the the case of this we want to make sure that it actually jumps out uh and then we save that and then we'll just execute it again um to make sure that we actually can see it we'll go down to the job and make sure that it does complete um and it did complete it's collecting there now it will complete and then what should happen is when we go back hopefully they'll actually sort of jump out to us now and and we'll be able to see those ones where there are p3s and it is a via uh vip so we'll go back into our interactive analysis and now we can see that uh jerrod bennett is in fact a vip uh i know because i set him as a vip and now we can see all of the ones um where there's still open incidents and the weight has increa excuse me has increased pretty substantially now and that includes not only my weighted but any other criteria that's actually inside of the incident spotlight group so it will tell us one if it's a p3 and it's a vip and then it'll also tell us any of those other criteria that are actually um out there and we'll be able to look at that a little bit more here in a second so the score details so this will give us the ability to actually look at what is making up that score that we saw which i believe was like 3 900 and something so what we'll do is is we'll actually go to one of those um incidents and we'll look at that so here we'll actually go directly into the form and here we can see what makes up all of the different criteria that are out there that actually make up that total score that we saw and what i'll do is when i when that comes back around i'll actually pause that and we'll talk about it uh for a little bit and help you better understand how the calculation is actually happening so let me look the job is running here so after the job runs and then we go and look at it or actually know we're looking at the incident so let's pause it right here so so what's happening here is you can see the p3 vip that i created and the weighted that it is which is very high but we also want them to jump out so uh they're definitely jumping out now so all of these other things if that was happening to the same incident it is actually flagged as well so not only is this a p3 vip incident we can also see that it's older than 14 days and it's actually older than 90 days as well now this is uh demo data so yours may not look exactly the same but let's just take for an example if a vips incident was was sitting there for over 14 days that's probably an issue most likely you've actually probably heard about it uh but if you have not uh these are ones that you want to jump out because you want to make sure that you take care of those vips in this particular use case again it could be something else for whatever you're looking for but this is important to see this this lets us know that you know we have a vip that is sitting out there uh a particular incident is sitting out there that's older than two weeks or 28 days or whatnot um or or you know maybe you know well it's out there because i don't know what's going on with it because the description is empty well hopefully someone would have already figured that out but if they have it this gives you the ability to actually see that on the fly anytime that you need to so again try to think of it as what use case can i generate around something like this of the hot topic things or or big ticket incident items request change problem whatever it is that you know needs to be taken care of uh obviously faster in a more timely manner um than something else not saying that all incidents are not important but we also know that there are particular ones they definitely do drive more attention um than other ones so again that total score of 3 900 i think in 10 is because it's made up of all of the things that we see here within the actual criteria that it actually flagged when the job itself ran so the interactive analysis which is what we actually looked at gives us the ability to actually drill down into that data quite a bit so here we're actually going to go into it we're going to go into the interactive analysis polynomial interactive analysis and then we can see that there's some numbers there but maybe you want to actually click directly into an incident and see something so here you can actually see that let me go back now that's not a great deal of information itself there but what we should do or what we can do is we can actually add information to that particular form so that way we can make it have more value and give us more information that we need directly inside that uh interactive analysis form uh so you don't have to go all over the place and maybe find out information we'll do that directly in here and that's what we'll do so in this case we actually i think i went too far into it let's play it again so in this case we're actually just going to configure the form so we're going to right click in the header and we're going to go configure form layout and then we're just going to add fields directly from the incident table so it knows those fields that are out there we'll grab those over this is probably very familiar to you maybe something that you've done quite a few times nothing new just adding information that you need directly into that form so it has more uh value so then we're gonna move over the the caller the priority the state move those around how we want them actually to be to be viewed uh and then when we save it the information will actually uh be directly there so again this you know you add as much as you want as least as you want what you think has actual value so then when you're looking at it or someone else is looking at it they can get you know direct information from it to again respond to the particular incident in this case that's being highlighted in the spotlight itself so there are some ones that i moved uh moving things around here and eventually i'll click save let's get rid of that we'll get rid of that we'll move state and priority up and job description i mean i'm sorry short description and then we'll hit save move score down short description up and now when we hit save we'll actually be able to see better information based on that particular spotlight but we can actually go further as well and we'll do that in the next slide so why don't we actually see the scores directly on that same page so let's add those so again we'll just go right back to that and but the thing is what we have to do is we actually have to create a relationship between the spotlight information and that particular form so if you've not created relationships before this is how we would do that so we would go to relationships we would click new we'd add a new one in this case we're going to name this spotlight audit and the table that it applies to is incident spotlight itself that's what we're going to look for and the queries from table and the spotlight audit so that's the form that we were looking at uh or the the information that came from so that's what we're gonna attribute it to so we need to add a line of code so um because uh even us here servicenow are not perfect uh you'll probably notice that i made some syntax errors in this one i actually typed it in uh and i actually didn't catch that until after i hit uh save for the very first time but the the line of code is correct that you're actually seeing in the slide so that's what you actually want to put in there so again you can create that relationship and then see those scores directly on that same form um in case you're curious the syntax that is wrong is the c is capital uh there was supposed to be a space uh where i have the equals and then i put sus id not sys id which i actually saw after i clicked uh save and then i actually went back in there and changed that and i'll highlight it here in a second so syntax is important obviously um so i need to change that there and i did actually forget to change the the current but i went back in there and changed that as well after the fact so now that we've done that we actually can go back to our interactive our spotlight interactive analysis and then we can add in uh what we've just added so in this case we'll go in there same thing we'll click into an actual incident record and then we'll right click at the top and we'll configure our form layout um and in this case i actually added a um we're getting to it so we created another section and then we added it directly to it uh and then i'll click save and you'll notice let me pause this you'll notice that there's some eighteen thousand eight hundred and eighty records well that is wrong because some of my syntax is still wrong and the syntax that is wrong is the capital c and the space so again i actually went back in there and changed that and when i did there was actually eight records but i didn't add it into the demo here so just be conscious of your syntax that it is correct and again what you're seeing here in the slide is actually correct you can copy that directly from it and add that you know into it and um it'll actually work and show you that uh and then i go on to actually just rearrange some columns here uh to what uh has better value and visible so i'm actually can i can actually do something from it so you know again a lot of information but you know again depending on what your use case is um you can you can get really good information out of spotlight and highly recommend that you you know you definitely use it for whatever um the needs are that you have so um again in conclusion spotlight gives you the ability to weight what is most important to you when you put a weight on the results it'll show you what is most important at that time spotlight also gives you the ability to see things that maybe a regular dashboard does not highlight enough that it jumps out at you think of different use cases that you can drive better outcomes from your business and create a spotlight around it so again there is a spotlight dashboard that is out there and you can add you can create a report from um something that is in spotlight and you can add it to that particular dashboard um so again if it's something that you know drives value or or or if there's something that you know that you need to react to faster than maybe is currently doing um and you don't necessarily have a way of highlighting that spotlight is definitely the way to do it it doesn't it doesn't get used as much as it should it should be used a whole lot more so if you can find you know some value in it definitely definitely highly recommend that you know you actually use it so some resources so there is a lot of spotlight information that's actually in servicenow documentation um everything that you saw that i did today in this slide you you can get all the directions to do the same thing directly in the servicenow documentation and there are some uh community documentation that's out there is actually was another office hours that was done last year that looked at spotlight a little bit differently than this particular one and there are some uh there is a blog that's out there that was wrote around it as well and there's definitely like adam was referring to earlier so now learning and some knowledge 20 uh information that's out there some courses and and knowledge 20 courses that you could definitely go to that actually highlight some spotlight information in there as well so take advantage of that um if you can um and with that are there any questions i see the q a was very quiet so either i'm very boring or the questions are too dynamic well thanks thomas as you as you go through it and as we see what questions come in and again if you have questions about spotlight or how you could use it um or anything else related to performance analytics and reporting please go ahead and put those in the q a um but i'll say when i when i use spotlight we focus on incidents there's incident change problem that's that's out of the box to get you started but the thing that that i go back to when i look at it is it's not about prioritization because the priority should be should use the priority right but it helps me understand is am i setting the right priorities as i if i want to evolve my priorities or change things differently i might use spotlight to help look at my backlog and look what's going on to help you find the process problem right not not a tactical what do i need to do next that's that should be the priority but we all know that not all incidents are created not all changes are created equal not all problems are created equal and rather than having to go through and read a thousand problems or a thousand stories and go what should i be doing i can use this to help me go through that and find the ones that that i know are more variable old ones are a problem business important business services i need to keep my eye on that and it allows me to really to quantify the different aspects i have in my mind and one of the key things that's less used but works extremely well is i'll put in some that have negative points so something that is in a certain state like my active backlog if it is awaiting customer input maybe i'll give that negative a thousand points says i don't care about anything else if if you're doing this i don't want to see it but it helps me get to that list so if i have a thousand things in my backlog maybe i'm coming down to a hundred that i'm gonna look at maybe it's down to 50 and i'll adjust the threshold to see what what's important and what's not and help me focus on those and then i ask myself why did we miss this why did we get here and i'm going to look at my process overall to understand this is what's important to me this is what was missed i'm going to go back and add a business rule or uh maybe i need to figure out a different way of assigning incidents to different categories or just talk to my team and say when you see this let's handle it a little bit differently maybe it's a separate sla we use the case of vip because it all happens to us right some executive has a problem i have to treat it if any if my ceo's printer is out of ink i need to handle that differently than if just random printer is out of ink perhaps this allows me to to step back and go you know what i need to have a different sla if the caller is a vip i need to have a different sla if i if the service if it's a critical service or it's an external facing service before i go implement all my slas i can start going through and um i i can go back and look and analyze spotlight and spotlight is very iterative um you're you won't get your weightings right the first time so you're gonna put in what you think run it and take a look and go well that's too many i can't look at all those i'm going to adjust it or the ones that are coming to the top those really aren't the most important ones to me so it's meant as a tool as an analyst to help go through the data and evaluate it and then trend it over time to see how are we doing and look at what's coming in and out and when you when you use it in that spot it's incredibly powerful very useful for you and lets you really organize your thoughts is th that's the way i i approach it and that it also helps me look at some things on what what fields what do i want to put into uh some machine learning right what do i see is really helping me but it's uh again that tool to help me organize my thoughts quantify them and adjust them so that i have really what i'm looking for um a question came in uh thomas that's can spot can spotlight be leveraged within various workbenches like the change workbench um i mean i i have never seen that actually used um i don't know adam have you ever actually seen that well um when we're looking at things as we look at it the spotlight records there's nothing magical about it they they are records uh we expose them in the view as thomas showed so any place we can as long as we can customize the what we're looking at we can put it in there we can run pa on it we can show the list um on a dashboard we can we can quantify how many are are lit up um so any place in the platform where you have it you can put it in there in the workbench if that is the service portal version of the workbench um you should be able to configure it um and add and add new things to it and it can be really helpful again i'm because i can look at so much criteria can i use can i use it to give me a little bit more information right uh again i because we can put all those waiting things in we can have lots of that query criteria or other pa things um it can help me quickly see what's going on uh quickly give me an indicator of some type of risk uh that's going to go on that is record by record uh so when we use when we combine this with pa so pa allows me to look at my aggregates and i can use my formula indicators to look at the aggregate information and i can i can pull that and display it this is looking record by record what is what is the score for this change for this incident and again help me understand that the value we get is where we're we identify we have a hole in our process when i break it down piece by piece i think this should be high priority but i'm giving it a low priority something is wrong with my process something's wrong with my prioritization that's what spotlight is to help you do right it is meant for the process owner to really uh dig into that process dig into what's going on and again any place it is creating records so any place we can see records which should be pretty much everything we can we can expose the data yeah adam and that next question actually makes me think about what what you're going to be doing next on the next office hours uh essentially is is taking information and setting up you know workflows or whatnot so again if there's records out there and they're exposed i mean this this is definitely something that can be done as well right yeah so this this could be a good one so the question that we got was can spotlight records be scheduled to be emailed to assignment groups if they have active records this is only like 95 of our use case for a couple weeks from now so we'll get to what we're going to talk about in the next office hours but yes i can certainly schedule a report it is records in a table um i can create a report and and and send it out so normal scheduled reports are going to go to a list of people any particular manager or assignment group could sign up and say if i have any send it to me we're going to talk about burst reporting in a couple weeks and we will look at this use case uh specifically uh about i run spotlight i have records in the spotlight again which are my exceptions spotlight helps you see the exceptions um we can we can go through and and then email the managers for those assignment groups that have record records that are uh above the threshold for for the spotlight okay another question um let's see um about uh not about spotlight but about pa and solutions for for agile and um and story backlog and trending on what's going on there there are a couple of newer content packs in this area um uh specifically dealing with uh safe and i think there is a new agile one that came out in paris or paris time frame i believe it's in the store um but there there have been some new things in the last few months in this area i don't know if it has what you're looking for because i know we get this question regularly so it depends when you looked um there there are new things coming in uh the the in that space um there there are new visualizations and new things coming out whether they're moving into workspace or in the classic or more content packs uh they're they're coming out and and for the follow-up to that is are they uh are they fee-based the for performance analytics you're they're included so we don't we don't charge for any particular content pack um but some of them if you do require pa then they require pa um but if you could build if we if you can build it you need to have the entitlement to run pa on that data and if that's the case if we build a content pack then then you're entitled to use it um if you're not entitled to run pa on that solution then the content pack uh you can't just buy the content pack um but that that's the same for everything so if i have an itsm content pack and i have itsm standard i can't get that content back but if i buy tsm pro anything dealing with itsm would come in i'm not sure in the in the agile space where that comes from but there there's certainly i know with itbm um which i think it's in that space uh itbm always comes with pa at this point so just look at your solution but there's no premium content pack that is separate we don't we don't charge for the analytics if you're entitled to build them yourselves we want to give them to you so you can save some more time okay another one came in um having to do with indicator sources and um cmdbci so cmdbci sorry or cmdb table and i'm looking through all my cis as a facts table um i i will start out by saying that that when you are creating indicator sources on cmdbci there is some tuning that's involved into potential performance issues because cmdb can certainly be in the millions of records and we need to query my entire active uh record base a millions fine 10 million 20 million we started can see some we we can handle it but it's not completely limitless and specifically there is a setting on how many records that can come back is important um the default number of records and an indicator source out of the box is 50 000 records which is most of our cmdbs are going to be quite a bit larger than 50 000 ci's you can raise that in paris the the best option is not to raise your default you want to leave your defaults at fifty thousand a hundred thousand somewhere in that range but for my specific indicator sources on cmdbci i am going to um expand i'm gonna expand that indicator source in paris there's a new setting to say how many records can this indicator source support and then we have a much better option about saying for my indicator source on cmdbci that can be 10 million records but just generic indicator source is we're gonna leave it at 50 000. um and the the question from cdbci has to then go to vulnerable items i will say with vulnerable items um there is a lot of tuning that's involved on to get what you want you want to use the content pack that comes with with the secops vulnerability response before i i would not try to build my own vulnerability response indicators i would use the content pack from there and just like everything start with the content pack if it's not meeting your needs um then then you can expand onto that and make sure so you have the content back which is great just make sure you have the latest version of it um and if you've gone through upgrades there are in general performance analytics has some issues with upgrades because we really don't like to change indicators out from underneath you so if you are upgrading to your content packs i'd recommend going through and uh spin up a dev instance when it from the developer portal you can get a dev instance install the new content pack um or or make sure you read the release notes on what's new because some of the things you do need to you have to manually update because again if you're looking at a dashboard you have a certain indicator we don't change it from underneath you we want you to make sure you acknowledge even if we think this is better you need to say yes i do want this change but if you have a question about a specific setting for um vulnerability response i would post in the community and we can try to get you the answer or if you want to uh reach out to your ae into the into the uh uh the vulnerability response um organization we can try and get you some some help um but it's vulnerability response certainly got some caveats in there on what will work and what won't um and you want to be careful with that the the enhancements we had in paris for pa were specifically designed for vulnerability response so there is a lot you can do but just we got to be careful about it okay so a question a question came out about forecasting um and and i will i can understand that forecasting is a the settings are a bit odd um it's the way i get certainly the way i look at it um that the forecasting periods if i have a daily indicator i believe the forecasting period is seven days um and there is not in what we have today there's not an option to change that so you can change the number of periods but we're the question is can i change what a period is can a daily indicator be a day is a period instead of a week um and it's documented in in the developer document or in the um the servicenow documentation about what the periods are for each frequency so i believe a daily indicator is a week um a monthly for a monthly indicator a period is um i think a year it's either three months or a year and that can sometimes be a little different than what you're looking for um and i believe i just got the documentation to put in uh yeah the 12 months the monthly is 12 months and i actually only want to forecast three months um that's not changeable today um if that's something you'd like to have i'd put an idea in for that uh so we can make sure we trace that back i don't know if there's one in there about being able to tune those there's a reason they are the way they are is to catch um seasonality better but i certainly can understand the use case where i only want to forecast three months maybe even with the seasonality but only show me three months because i know 12 months out is just not realistic anymore and if you are adjusting the forecasting settings make sure you do look at that documentation because the number of periods is not a period of forecasting is different than the period for the indicator because we are in we are integrating in that that seasonality so i think the answer is right now no but please put an idea in so that we can we can better address that and possibly integrate that in a future release thomas a question for you my um my incident spotlight was inactive and i activated it um and once the dashboard once it has some results i need to modify the criteria uh ah to filter out a few assignment groups how do i remove the results to update the spotlight scores yeah i was actually looking for a doc that we had on that to actually give the um the correct information on it uh well when you do run it again it'll mark those initial ones inactive so in the spotlight in the odd not in the audit in the in the spotlight records i believe there's an active and inactive field and we mark the uh the old ones inactive if they're not found um yeah so you're saying that once you change the criteria for a particular one to then effect remove or only look for specific assignment groups and you run it again it won't show those uh the other ones that's what you're saying right yes right there should be an act an inactive flag so you're or you're looking for the active flag as true and what's in what's um spotlight i i need to take a look what that field is but i believe that's there yeah that's what i was looking forward to all right if you if you want to take a look forward but i believe there's a flag for it um on the other side you can just delete all the records um you can just go in and manually delete them from the spotlights they they're you know they'll be regenerated um as i said i treat this very much as an iterator iterative process that i'm going for and my first my first few attempts are not necessarily good um you know they're what i think but what i think and what is whether it's reality or not always aligned um so i'm gonna go through and run it multiple times um and it is intended to show you kind of what got fixed where they deleted where they deleted from so if i um uh thomas do you have spotlight up do you want to show how we can delete them or what the active is uh sure i can bring it up let me get it here so the spotlight audits uh are the records that they're the individual details so that's that's not low or that's too low of a level from what you're looking for but i think if we look into the spotlight groups you should just see them in the related list as spotlights yeah right here there's the spotlights right here and there isn't the active flag so what you're gonna be looking for generally is where the active flag is true um but in subsequent runs if it if it's no longer a spotlight record then you'll see the active as false so we update all the ones that are not there to be false but you'll see it right in the right in the spotlight groups you will see the the spotlights related lists where you can delete them from yeah i don't have any that that are active so i mean or are false sorry um okay uh it didn't yeah i i don't know why they wouldn't be inactive um i i'd have to look at that use cases why it's not because i would expect it to be there if they're not in there but uh particularly if i'm just getting started and i'm saying these should never have been lit up if that was just kind of more of a configuration error to me then i'm just going to delete them delete them and start over keep kind of keeps a little bit clean to get going and i'll look through it oh yeah and i'll get back to russell on this i'll figure this out get back okay great um okay next question and we have a few more minutes so a few more minutes so go feel free to throw those into the q a um in a formula indicator i want to use the last day of the month but could not figure out how to do that um and ended up the month average um i i need to look i think we did some things you're going to want to use a formula indicator for this and feel free to post something in the community and we'll give you the example if we haven't done it recently maybe we'll do another office hours early next year on on using the pa formulas so i believe in madrid we introduced the pa formula utils and what you're going to end up doing is getting a score from the date and you the short answer is you score start so so when you in formulas we have score start there is a score end but i will just tell you what what score end is is not what you think it is so i only use score start in my in my formulas and with score start it's a glide date time object and with that glide daytime object i'm able to add if i want the last day of the month on a monthly indicator i am going to take my score start add a month and then subtract a day um months the end of the month is always a bit challenging because we have different numbers of days uh but add months does add a month whatever whether it's february or july it adds a month so you take score start you add a month to it then you subtract a day from it and that is the last day of that month um so if you post that in the community i'll get you a little code snippet that does it um and if we haven't gone through it recently which it would be a while if it's if we haven't done it we'll do an office hours on using formula indicators uh using the functions the formula functions the pa formula utils inside of formulas to do a little bit more manipulation and specifically if you want to get the last day of the month from a backlog if i have the use case that formulas were real for the formula utils was built for was something similar to this to say i want to get the backlog so i have a daily backlog but then i want a monthly roll up right i i do want to see my backlog every day but then i want to take a step back i just want to get what was the la what was the backlog on the last day of the month um a lot of times i can get by by saying what's the first day of the next month but we still have some date manipulation to go through and and the formula details let us do that so uh again we'll we'll cover in office hours but if you post something in the community we'll get you an answer a bit quicker and we have a question about about historical collections um and i will say when we get into historical collections there's a couple previous office hours that talk about the time shifting that goes on um so if we don't answer it enough in enough detail now feel free to ask a follow-up question um but there's that we do a little bit more depth in some of those previous um office hours on data collections uh data collection uh thomas did one recently and there's one from back that goes into a little bit more detail about time shifting specifically but the question we have is if i run a historical collection job with relative six months ago and my created and updated fields are set to before today will the collection use a relative date back six months ago or will be as static today um and the answer is it's adjusted so all the date fields um there i in some versions in some older versions there is an issue with related list conditions not time shifting correctly but in the main conditions if we exclude related list conditions um the main conditions whenever you use a date in the date picker whether it's today or this month or next month or anything but a constant if you pick a constant date it's a constant date but if you're using today or last week or last year or this quarter those are all time shifted into what the data collector is so what what physically happens is when i say i have a daily indicator and it's saying before today like things close before or opened before today created before today um and then actually i will go if i'm going to use created before today it runs if i'm running a daily job for six months it actually runs the indicator source it runs it 180 times it's querying and it's adjusting the date every time we want to go back every time we want to go back so that that's it is shifting through all those the caveat being is created on doesn't change but updated does so updated is generally not safe and safe to do a historical collection because i'm updating all the time right if i have an incident's been open for six months i i my last update was yesterday my last date was always yesterday but created on resolved on closed on things that don't change or don't change very often if they change they get better they get more accurate those are okay but be very very very careful about updated about querying historically on updated understand the data is most likely not correct um it may be directionally correct enough um but that that's up to you to decide whereas created it it takes quite a bit of work to update created and created is never updated um you know by by design so you should be safe with that time shifting uh and uh sucron one of our stars and support i chimed in that that when you do rerun the job it should delete and insert the new spotlight scores for that group um so it should automatically delete them um which should be good i think the the active flag might be from a previous version in paris um a a couple of highlights in paris as we look at different versions uh just to make sure we call these out in paris you have the ability to copy a spotlight job i believe that's when we introduced that functionality um so that if i have uh two groups and they have two different two different sets of criteria that's okay we can we can support it so i can have my my incident group uh my spotlight group on um open incidents but then if um my external phasing just has a very different um a different set of criteria than my my internal facing i can copy that and select which breakdown i want to use so i to be able to use it on different sets of data i'm going to um filter if my super set of data comes from an indicator and if i need to filter that based off of breakdown i can do that and i can just simply copy it to adjust you have to build from scratch every time and then i believe we improved domain separation in paris so spotlight was the same for a few releases but if you're uh pre paris and and um uh i believe it was paris although perhaps it was orlando i apologize uh in the orlando paris time frames we did make some changes so if it looks a little different um make sure you look at the release notes on what we did there were some enhancements that came from from customer requests they got put in so i know we added the support for domain separation making a copy um that that's all there and su cronk uh is telling me that it was orlando uh so it's the difference between uh uh orlando yes it does support domain separation um uh now but i don't think it originally did both sucron can correct me if i'm wrong there too so again look at those look through the release notes of what's in there um because you will see some of those minor enhancements come through okay uh with that i think we're going to wrap up so i am going to share my screen okay uh so again thanks thomas for walking us through spotlight and how we can use it um hopefully that that gives you some some of us insight on what um how we can use spotlight and how it fits the needs it is not um it's not gonna change everything we do but it's a really powerful tool for the right use cases so make sure you think about you know what's the right tool to use here and spotlight again is just a very powerful option for you and powerpoint crashed on me which which is great um so as we uh as we wrap up um basically we want to go through to say uh remember that there is uh there's a lot of content in uh now learning if you haven't done that great content in the community there's a lot of blogs and things that are out there if you have a question like we had with the formula indicators please feel free to to post it in there again screenshots on what you've done what's not working explain what you're trying to get and what you are getting when you stop when you put all that in there it really helps us get you an answer very quickly without telling you to do something you've already done but if we don't know you've done it then we may we you know we'll start from there so we have the community um we are in the process of formulating what we're going to talk about for the next few months in office hours so please uh look for that posting that we have and i know some of you have put in some suggestions on what you'd like to see covered please add to that in the next week or so is a really great time to do that um as we're forming what we're going to be talking about in the next few months we want to talk about what you want to hear about um so please let us know and what we are going to talk about in two weeks is uh an add-on to using analytics in our workflow that we covered a few sessions ago we're going to specifically walk through the use case of creating a burst reporter so the use case that that came up that we'll we will cover is i run spotlight i have some some records that are lit up i want to send a report to the manager of the assignment groups that have records in spotlight the same use case works if we just want to say who has open backlog who has breached slas i don't i don't want to send an email to every manager in a distribution list which is something we can do now and i don't want to have every manager goes go create their own scheduled report so we're going to create a workflow that says i want to send this report to the managers that have that that qualify in this list so really i know it's something we could ask for a lot doing it out of boxes is uh it's not supported out of box but we're gonna see how to build that in a workflow so that you have that available to use when you need it all right so once again uh thanks for joining us thank you thomas for the presentation and we look forward forward to seeing you again in two weeks and for those of you in the u.s have a happy thanksgiving and we'll talk to you in december thanks anna