good morning good afternoon good evening uh welcome to performance analytics and reporting office hours welcome to our new attendees and welcome back for those of you who are joining us again as we get started we're going to run through a couple of intro slides going through a couple of some logistics and then we'll get into uh a presentation that we have prepared for you and some info and then we're going to open it up to questions whether related to what we've talked about uh beforehand or anything else you have to do about any questions you have about performance analytics and reporting so first of all this session is for you it's to expose you to some fresh ideas give you a deeper better understanding of some of the features you have access to and give you really practical guidance we want to make sure that you can do some of these things that we're talking about this session is being recorded as uh and will be posted uh to the community and to youtube later this evening or tomorrow and as we're going again since this is for you please ask us questions as we're going we want to make sure you have a really good understanding about what we're talking about when you are asking us questions please use the q a and zoom that allows us to make sure that we are able to answer each question that you have if you use the chat sometimes those get lost and we don't want to do that but the q a makes allows us to make sure that we are able to address each and every one of your questions so today my name is adam stout i'm an outbound product manager for perform for now platform and now intelligence covering performance analytics and our speaker today is thomas davis also an outbound product manager covering now platform and now intelligence you've heard from us before but thomas has some great really interesting information for you i know i learned a lot when i was seeing this before we went go before we got going again these are all recorded uh they're posted in the community the same place where you registered for this session you'll see that the recording and the deck that we go through will be posted there as well if you're looking for any uh any additional information all the previous sessions are there i believe we have something like a year's worth of sessions now you can go back you can watch those any sessions you missed you can get the decks you get some the relevant links for them and you also see the next couple sessions on what we're planning to talk about as you're looking and you're trying to find more information we certainly do encourage you to leverage now learning there's a lot a lot of training out there covering this material uh also the k20 labs are there i did find out that the k20 labs are going to be retired at some point so if you haven't taken advantage of that you do want to take advantage of that in the near future don't wait they will not be there forever so if you have not taken those please take them i think we have close to a dozen performance analytics and reporting labs in there from k20 take those send them to your friends send them to your family but they're there for you to take take advantage of and we also do always want to recommend that if we don't get to your question or it's something if we don't get your question at the end of this please ask in the community if you haven't read this article it is just a great post about how to write a great question in the community when you follow these steps you're going to get answers if you don't if you skip some of these it sometimes is a challenge to get your question to the right people but some great tips very short article about how to write a great question to so that you get the answer you're looking for all right now that we've covered uh some of these logistics let's let's get into it so thomas are you there i'm here all right so i'm going to hand it over to you to talk about simplifying reporting on surveys uh this is a kind of a more in depth of one of the sessions we had earlier about database views and querying related tables some of the questions we got from that inspired this and thomas has put a lot of work in here into this to to really give you some insight about how do we report on surveys it's one of those big challenges we always get um and i think we're all gonna be coming back to this to learn how to do it so thomas over to you okay thanks adam appreciate it so you can see my screen i'm sharing now right yep looks good okay good so again my name is thomas davis and uh today we're going to talk about um simplifying reporting on surveys and we have a use case around it that we're we're going to try to talk through today um and like adam said this uh presentation will be attached in a blog on the community when we're done um so if you want to try to follow along um as you're watching this you're more than welcome uh but please feel free to sit back and watch uh because again everything that's in this will will be in the blog um as well so with that so uh like i said so we have a use case and this is really not that uncommon it it is something that has been asked for uh quite a few times in the community and um i know that i personally have been on uh a call with a customer that was asking for something that was very similar to this so we thought it would uh make perfect sense to do um you know an office hours around it to try to give an idea of exactly how that you can do this so so our use case is although survey management gives us the ability to create manage and view completed surveys we need a way where we can see all the survey results for a particular survey we'd like to have a row showing all data for a particular survey and is it possible to have a survey question itself as a column header with the results in each row for each survey so it's kind of thinking about data um the survey data incest itself sort of normalized to say okay i want to have if there's 15 surveys for a particular uh survey can or 15 response excuse me for a particular survey can i see all those on one screen each taking up their own row with all of the answers as you go across and other information so again this is something we've been asked for quite a bit so here we go we're going to go through that and try to figure that out today so our solution for this is we're going to take the survey assessment data and then we're going to put it into a database view and then that will give us the ability to actually see it in a report and potentially report on it in different ways as we go through it so for a database view you do have to be a sysadmin to actually create uh a database view so if this is something that you um want to do after we get done this office hours but you're not an admin then you may want to get with your admin and share this with them as well and and talk through with them exactly what you're trying to accomplish uh with the experience that you gained today in this call yourself so just some housekeeping so you know we do have survey management that's already out there and we're not uh this is again where you can create send and collect responses for basic surveys surveys are also um you know can be used in the service portal if you install the service widget um that comes and as you can see here in the screenshot there's a servicenow doc that uh you can reference that gives you a great deal of information as it relates to service management so this call today the purpose of this call is to show another way to display service survey data it's definitely not meant to replace anything that is currently within the platform itself and there is of course the link down at the bottom where you can get to that servicenow doc that has has a great deal of great information on itself and database views as well so you know having an understanding of database views is also very important uh although it this does require system assist admin to create you will need to work with your sysadmin access office hours explain how and what your needs to happen what you need to happen inside the database view to accomplish this solution uh so even if you can't create one it's very important for you to have an understanding around what database views can do here's some great links as well to a servicenow doc and also a former office hours that we had that talked about querying multiple tables that has really great information about database views uh themselves so let's get into actually creating um our database view so there are some tables that we're going to access um and need inside of our database uh view and ones that you should become familiar with so uh assessment instance and that's where actually you know the surveys themselves are uh housed and uh all of the surveys and assessments and i know i keep saying survey and assessments uh with newer releases uh i think they're getting more towards calling them assessments as opposed to survey but there's probably some legacy out there so i'll just keep calling on both of those and then we'll also connect to the assessment instance question table that's where the questions themselves are for a particular survey and then we'll connect to the metric type and again this is uh the particular survey itself what it is and then of course it connects to the the questions and then the responses inside of that so those tables are the ones that we're actually going to work with today inside of our database view and again another great link at the bottom of this slide here that you know tells you what comes installed um as it relates to assessments uh and again a great link with really good information itself so if you're not familiar with building a database view uh and if you are then this is nothing new to you so you basically go to the filter navigator and you type in database views and um and then it'll come up with actually all the ones that were there so again if you're not an admin you actually can't see that when you type that in you will not see that uh but if you are then you know that you can go there and type that in and here is where we'll actually create uh our database and this is sort of the first step that we're showing right here in this preview we're naming uh the database uh survey results demo because that's what we're doing today we give it a label that's more uh easier to read and then anytime that you have a description it's highly recommended that you use that that sort of goes uh back to something that i wrote uh many months ago that talks about descriptions but you should definitely anytime that you can maximize the description and help somebody else that's coming in to look to know exactly what uh is there definitely utilize that so again this is uh what our database name is going to be so from there we'll move on so next the first thing that you want to do is you want to create your first join so if you click on new and in this case we're going to collect connect to the assessment instance table that's going to be our first join and then we'll go ahead and give it a prefix uh of just instance a short abbreviation of instance and our order will be 100 and then we'll submit that so there is no uh where clause in this very first one it's just establishing that first connection to the assessment instance table itself so next one of the big things that we have to do in order to make this database um or this view work is we have to grab some sys ids now this itself is a little bit time consuming but uh at the end of the day once it's actually created then we'll have the you'll have the ability to have this in it it will be there so the first thing that we need to do is we'll need to grab the assessment metric type uh sys id so we'll go to and again this is going directly to um the table and you could see in the preview there that i actually typed in their um asmt underscore metriconsporttype.list and this gets me directly to it and then i search for for our demo we're going to look at servicedesk satisfaction surveys so i searched for that and then it came up and i clicked into it and when i clicked into it uh actually didn't i just grabbed the sys id directly from there and then i just brought up a notepad or text editor whatever you have and paste that in there because we are going to need it um later so if you're familiar with how to actually get to tables this is all that we're doing right here is grabbing that first um sys id which is the metric type of service desk satisfaction survey so we know that that's going to be our base point so next what we have to do is we we have to grab the sys ids for our actual questions so depending on the survey that you use and um i know just from talking to previous customers there there could be a lot of surveys inside of your instance there could only be a few surveys inside of your instance some surveys have more questions some have less questions but at the end of the day you know you have to grab the sys id in order to make it a column with which is what we're trying to do we have to actually grab that sys id so in this preview here we're actually showing how uh we're going to do that so in this case we're going to the assessment instance question.list table which is what i'm typing there in the preview and then when we go there again same thing we're going to search for the service desk survey uh inside of the category column there and we'll find that and and then when it comes back i went ahead and grouped by the metric uh because these are results so rather than seeing the results i want to see the actual questions and you can see here i expanded and then i clicked into uh the particular question right clicked in the gray banner at the top and i grabbed that same sys id and then i went over there and pasted it inside of my notepad again so a lot of work um you know getting these things but uh once you see what we're actually able to accomplish with it it'll make perfect sense so that's what we'll do there so there in this particular one there are six questions so for the sake of time uh and you can see the videos kind of moving here a little bit faster i went ahead and grabbed all of those particular sys ids and i have them here in the notepad so we can use those so now that we have all of those and we've grabbed them then you'll notice in the next slide we'll actually go to start building out um our view because we'll need those sys ids the metric type one and also the question assist ids to build our where clause inside of our joins so once you have all of those um then again we'll be ready to go actually over to the next slide so in this case so now we go right back down to view tables we go back to our our database view and we go down to view tables and we click new in this case we're going to the instant question which is the same table that we just uh went to where we grabbed all of the sys ids we give it a prefix just question one give it an order this means this is what we want to grab secondly and here is the actual um where clause that is pasted into the database view itself so what are we what are we learning inside of this where clause so the metric type so we're saying okay we need to go to the instant uh metric type which was our first join and we need to you know grab that particular cis id which correlates over to the service uh service desk survey satisfaction survey and then we say okay now that we have that i need to go to the question um join and i need to make sure that our sys ids match up to the particular question that i'm looking for so give me the sys id of the instant metric which was the first join join that to the question one join it says i need to look inside the mitch metric type table for this cis id and then when i find that i then want to look for the actual question in this case question one which is the cis id in the second part of the view that we have there so again this same where clause is what we'll actually use in every one of our joins uh going forward because it works the same exact way you just have to make some small minor changes uh to the where clause itself so for example when we go to the second uh the second question it would look just like this but the the prefix would say quest 2 it would say 300 and then uh and then the sys id for the metric type would stay the same but then we would go back to our notepad we'd grab that second question sysid and we would pop it into right here where the cis id is so that's what you have to do and you have to do that multiple time and obviously you know if a survey had uh quite a few questions then obviously you would be doing uh that quite a few times but once you have all the information and do it and doing you know copying and pasting it should make it uh relatively easy so you can see here these are all the other joins that i added into the view uh and then you can see to the right here what the view actually looks like so you can see that there is a join for every question and then also uh the very first join which was you know establishing our our connection to the metric type so here's exactly what it will look at and you can see minor changes uh everything is the same except for you know the the prefix it's different all the way down our orders are going to be different because we want to get them in the order that we need them and then of course the sysid that we have in the second part of that where clause is different based on what um question that we have so that again that's all of it uh and for time's sake rather than me having to do all of those i went ahead and and added all those uh into the joint so when we actually have it all done now let me back up a minute because one thing that i would definitely suggest to you is that after you've done um any one of these joints i would highly recommend that you go ahead and click the try it button which you can see right here um that's basically going to let you know whether or not what you did is correct if you had any syntax uh issues though it'll actually come up and tell you that you have those syntax issues so again you add the first join in uh try it make sure that there's no issues you add the the second one in try it make sure that you actually get some results back and so on and so forth that's going to help you because you know if you go through all of those and put them all in and it is um one particular syntax error that is wrong uh and you've copied and pasted then you're gonna have to go back to each one of those joins and fix that anyway so it just makes sense to sort of do that as you go and you'll see that information pop up if it's correct you'll see it pop up in the results when you actually try it so make sure you do that's very important so um again we click try it and one of the things that you'll notice is you have quite a bit of columns of information so when you click try it and you click on the cogwheel sprocket where you actually want to personalize your list of what you want to see you'll see a lot of information and you'll scroll down we can't scroll here but you can see that uh it's got a quite a bit of information the information that we need for this particular use case is we want the metric type which is the survey name itself um the number uh the actual response id for that particular survey uh who it's assigned to um created when it was actually created what state it's in uh maybe they have not finished they've submitted it or whatnot um but they haven't finished it in most cases if it's in this it has actually been finished and then um the questions right so you can see here that they're all string values uh because they're you know different uh limits and different sizes and based on the question or whatnot so it's a string filled anyway so it comes back as a string value so for this particular use case this is what uh i've added into it but again based on what your use case in is you can get um you know all the information out of that that you need and again a database view and we'll talk about this a little bit later but a database view can have everything that you need in there based on the joints so the joins that we did were really geared around the survey itself but maybe you want to get more information about the sign too so maybe you need to add in uh some sort of join that will give you information about who is actually assigned to so you can then pull in maybe the manager or the department or the assignment group or things like that so again you can add that information into it but for just this use case we did not do that um but again the these are what we're actually bringing over uh into the the results at this point so um this is what we would return right so when we hit try it now after me adding in my columns this is what we would get so we can see here that we have the name and this is the individual response this is who it was assigned to this one was created completed and then we have our stream values so um at the end of the day this actually gives us what the customer was asking for it gives them the ability to look for survey desk uh service desks satisfaction surveys and all of the results that are there we happen to have 16 in my instance but it would be as many as that they had there now you're probably saying to yourself whoa okay i see string value but what is that because i would expect to see the question uh the actual questions so it would make more sense to me and i'd actually get some value because i agree this right here doesn't actually have a whole lot of value i could tell you that this one allows probably someone to type in it but i don't know exactly what it is uh some have numbers and there's a yes or no but it doesn't have everything that we need to get you know better value out of it so what we can do and and there was actually a blog that was wrote a few weeks back that actually showed you how you could customize column headers in it and i would definitely uh encourage everyone to go to that particular blog and watch that it has videos in it as well that actually shows you how to do it um and basically what happens in that blog is you create a dictionary relationship between um the sys dictionary and the database view not the particular one but the database view as a whole and what that then does is it gives you the ability to then give better names for any of those columns that maybe the names are not you know really working for and it doesn't necessarily have to be a string value it can be any one of the columns inside of your database view where you can actually change the name of those where it has more value to you and your particular customer based on whatever your use case is and whatever that uh you need to be present inside of the results of that database database view so i definitely encourage you to go and look at that particular blog so you can learn more about that so based on that blog um what we have here is this is our original um try it the results inside the tridents inside the database view we just saw that a few moments ago um and basically this is what we have at the top right stream value streamed out times six right there's six of those which means absolutely nothing to us so after you do what's inside of the customizing column headers blog this is what you then can get and if we make that bigger now we're actually able to see that those stream values what exactly they are now i actually rearrange these a little bit as well because it just made sense once i actually saw the question i just changed what order they were in so initially the comments which again i sort of just figured this was the first one because it had comments in i move that to the end because maybe you want to read those comments after you've looked at everything else and these are abbreviations sort of not really abbreviations but smaller sort of forms of the particular question and again in the blog what you'll find out is that when you actually hover over them the hint which in my case that i did inside of the the labels that i did for these i actually put the question itself as the hint and the hint is basically a hover over so when you hover over the actual question it'll give you the entire question as opposed to what we sort of slim this down to be and we slim this down just because it can get very wide based on how long that question is how much information or verbiage is in a question so again that's up to you it just made more sense and it looked better to actually slim that down a little bit but again you know customizing column headers is um is very powerful and it gives you the ability to really clean up the data that you're actually getting out of the database view itself so you know i know that was probably fast and a lot of information but again it's directly inside of this office hours and this powerpoint will actually be saved and it'll be there the videos will be inside of the blog itself so you can actually watch those again maybe at a slower pace and go through them but in review we were actually we were able to actually give the customer exactly what they were looking for so we're able to give them the the solution to their use case and again the data that's presented is only limited by the joins that you have inside of your database now i wouldn't tell you to have you know 20 30 40 views understand what i'm saying because then you can start having some leads latency issue depending on how much data that's there but again if it needs a couple more joints so you can pull more data in so it's more valuable to you then i would definitely highly highly suggest that you actually do that and again with the customization of the column headers we were really at you know able to make that data mean sense to the user and and again give them exactly what they were looking for so you know database view is the right option for this use case but for the use case maybe it's not a database view and that's when i would refer you back to the querying multiple tables office hours we had a few weeks back and then there's some different ways even in that that you can actually pull data together and uh view it as well so some very good useful links here so the survey management which we talked about at the very beginning this is that same link that's in there go there see everything that is there that you're actually able to get within survey management maybe you don't need a database view maybe you're able to get everything that you need out of what's already in the platform if that's the case that is awesome uh so go there and definitely look and see what was there database views you know again uh make sure you familiarize yourself with them and even if you can't create them it's still a good idea to you know to know how to do them so when you're you're sitting with your admin or whoever is going to actually create that for you uh you can refer back to this and say hey this is that that doesn't look right this is actually what it's supposed to look like and knowing you know what a where clause is and a prefix and a label and things like that it's it's definitely important and it never hurts to know more information anyway and again what's installed with the assessment so go to this link it lets you know everything that is out there that is installed with the assessments and it is a great deal of information and i highly recommend that you look at that again there's the office hours that are the blog i'm sorry that i was referenced to with the customize and the column headers uh go to that uh maybe you already have a database that's out there that you're familiar with and you you said to yourself i really wish the column header was something better now here this all this blog will actually show you where you can do that so even if it's outside of this particular use case there's still a lot of value in that as well and then again talking about this particular case of database view work but maybe it's not working for your use case and here this office hours the query multiple tables gives you more uh insight into even more and you know different ways that you can bring data together based on what your actual use case is so again a lot of great information a lot of great links definitely use those um and with that questions so please go ahead and put your questions in the q a and we can answer them and and if they're not related to us that's fine anything dealing with performance analytics and reporting we're happy to talk about uh one comment that came in which i want to try men on uh about customizing column headers so i i've been working with servicenow for seven and a half years and i am sure that i have told customers you can't do it because i've asked people have asked me and i'm like yeah you can't customize the the uh the column headers uh out of view they just they are what they are consistent you know their reference to to the real fields you always know what the real field was um and uh as thomas and i were working on on this solution and uh dan kane as well which some of you may have seen some of his posts in the community uh we were going through it and uh i think dan showed us just oh you just changed the label and it's amazing to me how much you can how much you can know and how much you cannot know about servicenow so it's always worth asking again um i feel very embarrassed that i didn't know that it's really easy and as thomas show wrote wrote up in the blog and showed it with a five minutes worth of work by your admin to add the relationship and add it to the view you can make it super easy to do and make that just a much better experience for your users so it's a it's awesome it's it's so easy and so awesome and powerful um thomas i appreciate you sharing that with everybody else yeah no problem um okay so again please go ahead and post any questions you have uh another one came in uh and i'm just reading it really quickly so uh a question came in um related to performance analytics and the the workbench view i i think they were talking about the workbench widget there uh and the the question i do with clicking through on the workbench we want to go to the to the analytics hub but in a new window and is it possible is it possible to um to configure the on click behavior and i'm going to answer this very generically and and ostensibly know in terms of opening in a new window or not opening in a new window there are some settings um uh there are some settings to change those things globally i don't really like messing with those because sometimes i want to sometimes i don't my preference is that i leave the on click in the window because a user can always right click and open in a new window but if i force it to a new window they can't all that being said the the visualizations here are are good they're so that what we've used in the classic the future one of the things that we all we should all take a look at is what is coming in workspace so a lot of amazing things in in the in the now experience and the workspaces that are there where we're we're moving from um analytics hub to kpi details to analytics center and kpi details uh which are actually two different words instead of the same word for two different things um the future of what you're going to see is in is in workspace and all the work we're putting in so kpi details analytics hub and kpi signals you can see you should see some of the stuff trickling out now in terms of what's in paris some really really really amazing stuff there um i would take a look at it i'm not sure that you you there's a lot to it so we can't just move there just for analytics but as we're looking to what are we going to get where are we going everybody here probably wants to look at what's available in paris and practices and office hours we'll go through that to showcase what's there it is absolutely the future there's amazing things in there the customizability of what's in workspace is is is phenomenal and the ability to create custom components and custom visualizations rather than being kind of a bolt-on after the fact you really can make them in line to what you want it to be so it's really a good good point for all of us here to be aware of what's coming in workspace so over the next uh few releases we're able to take advantage of those things and move and help move your organization to the now experience in workspaces as appropriate but i'll tell you from from performance analytics reporting visualizations everything that you have not everything many of the things that you've asked for uh they're they're in the workspace version they're in the in the now experienced version as opposed to uh being improved in the classic we will see improvements in classic we we're you know we understand where we're all at with dashboards but we're re-implementing things to to address your requests your concerns the things that you wanted are are coming in there so make sure you watch some of those uh those showcases those demos on what you're gonna see in paris and then coming in quebec and continuing on it is it is really amazing okay another question uh came in um i'm gonna i'm gonna follow up on a question that has to do with with the workbench widget following the breakdown source elements and the breakdowns on the breakdowns on the widget stopped working um so this this is a real issue with with the workbench widget is to me one of the most amazing visualizations the data density on a workbench is amazing for the right persona generally a process owner the workbench is great if you're not familiar with it make sure you go look up the workbench widget but one of the things with the workbench widget is it can get you into trouble because it the workbench itself has two levels of breakdown and so if you add a breakdown on the dashboard you end up with three levels so the the thing you need to be aware of if you're using the workbench widget is one make sure you are collecting the matrix because the workbench itself has two levels of breakdown so every indicator you show needs to have two levels of breakdown you need to collect the the matrix the most common issue i see is people don't collect the matrix and then data doesn't show up because there's no data to show and if you need the third level you actually can get a third level effectively um in a workbench you got to make sure that you don't have you can't show the third level you can't collect the third level so you have to make sure that you're structuring your uh you have to create additional indicators so generally the chevrons on the workbench you're not going to just use the plain indicator but you'll create an addition additional indicators if you have a question on how to do this i recommend posting in the community because it's fairly specific to the configuration on what's going wrong there's a few things that are coming in um but again the matrix is the most common thing uh second to that it's the third level and if you if you have the third level uh if you post a screenshot of what you're trying to do we might be able to have some suggestions on on how to approach it but you can get it to work we absolutely do get it to work um and it's amazingly powerful um when when it's configured to get what you want okay so the next question uh that came in uh how does the left join work on a database view so um the left in database views in database views the default is interjoin so you have to have records in both tables the if you add if you what i generally do is personalize the view the related list views to add left join so that i don't forget it but you can set the left join and left join is is a traditional left join it means the the you have to have records in on the left side of the join on the main table um what comes the order before it but on the right side there can optionally not be data so that's important for the surveys in that if you have questions that may not be answered if you don't left join you would only get those res you'd only get rows back when every single answer was filled out there was an entry for everything if you might have some that are filled out some that don't because there was branching or uh i don't know if we actually store the blanks the blank answers or not then you'd want to left join so that you'd always have you'd want you'd want to have the main table be the assessment because there has to be an assessment there must be the survey but then every answer you're joining to you'd want to left join there is no right join and left join or right join are logically effectively the same as just the order you put them in but there is no right join and there is no cross join you can't say a table uh you can't join the records in a or b that aren't in common you do have to join join one we only support left joins inner joins and left joins which covers most but not all use cases but make sure you check that box and again i personalize the related list to always show me the left join so i don't forget it because otherwise i forget it and i get weird results and as thomas said uh he mentioned it a couple times we can mention a couple times more every time you mess with a view press try it because you never know if you you know you mixed a single quote in a double quote or you had some small typo particularly when we're dealing with cis ids so just always quick try it and that you're continuing to get data that's generally if you don't know when you should left join and when you shouldn't left join by clicking try it every time when you have data and then all the data disappears that's probably a good time to check a left join so clicking try it is is just incredibly important to keep you sane okay and again please continue to push submit your questions if you have any more um a question that came in was are we going to cover pa for cmdb later um we certainly we certainly can we can put that on the list uh of things of things to cover you you certainly can run cm seem to be in pa for cmdb there are a few content packs that come available for for uh cmdb that are available specifically focusing on health some of the things that come out as well i i believe with the cmdb content packs there are some indicators that are shipped that aren't actually put on a dashboard but they're there so i know when i focus on health there are indicator out-of-the-box indicators for cmdb health i would look at those even if they're on the dashboard and cmdb one one of the things things to bring up is seem to be it does have some challenges um and the main challenge is you we the lumbar breakdowns so for cmdb you can't really break down on ci the ci itself which is which is legitimate on why i'd want to do that but we don't support breaking down on a million elements which i can easily have a million ci's um but you can't break down by ci class um and that uh you certainly can break down ci class and one of the big things um uh uh good question that came into uh one of the big things with this is that pa um used to have some more uh challenges with large data sets and out of the box we restrict our indicator sources to um fifty thousand about fifty thousand records and everybody's cmd cmdb is bigger than fifty thousand records so it would say i'm not collecting anything because it's too big um in paris there were some changes so there was some optimizations done to the data collector which allows us to go well beyond 50 000. the default is still 50 000 because logically for many of the things we want to do 50 000 is enough um having 50 000 open incidents is a lot not for all of us but for for many of us um so the 50 000 is still there but what you're able to do in paris is to set for specific indicator sources like my active ci's i can set that from 50 000 i could set it to 10 million there still are some restrictions when we get to the breakdowns and some things that come in but if i'm simply looking for account by ci class particularly if i'm not doing the matrix for this for cmdb uh depends on the number of scores you're getting to but um you can for those for a specific indicator source change that limit from 50 000 to 10 million prior to paris you could do it but you have to change the global setting and now you no longer have to do that so we can be a lot safer and a lot smarter and do a lot more with cmdb that we were not able to do in the past um when uh so the follow-up question this and i think we'll leave cmdb after after this uh uh the last part of this has to do with with uh query results i'm thomas i believe you talked about this before you want to um briefly talk about pa for cbd query results uh you're talking about based on the former um office hours that we had yeah yeah so so we did a um an office hours a um again a few weeks back where we actually um used the cmdb query builder and we were building um queries inside of that that we then used inside of pa itself so if you're if you're not familiar with that and you want a really good um you know office hours and some videos as well uh i would definitely suggest you go out to the community and find the um building performance analytics with um corey i'd have to look at look it up exactly is that right name of it is yeah well but uh i think it was uh it was in july or or august is when it was and again it gives some really good information into uh actually doing that and there is a use case in that that we did as well and walk through the entire process of actually building um using the cdb query builder in that as well so definitely hit up the community and you can get that and i actually try to grab that real quick and maybe put it in the chat i grabbed i'll i'll put that in the chat oh okay good let me uh put that to everybody and we'll we can put that link out as well um it is it was august 12th leveraging seemed to be query builder and reporting um and similar to the use case today i get thomas gets all the hard ones um it's actually not that hard but it's not intuitive so whether it's watching re-watching the session today or watching the session on the query builder once you know how to do it it's uh it's not that difficult to do um and cmdb i will i will add that the out of box content packs are fine but they're not everything you'd want them to be um so that's certainly something there are some new content backs i believe so you want to look at what's out there you can do more than what we do in the content packs and you'll see a lot of what we're doing with cmdb uh manifests itself in in the other and other content packs so security ops and vulnerability response leverages a lot of scene db so we're we're looking to incorporate cmdb and then specifically uh csdm into more of the content packs but as as we're going through we build a lot of new content packs the old ones um may not take advantage of all the features that we're able to get to in paris because that content back might have been done a release or two ago so you can certainly enrich them and we are continuing to go back going back to enrich the old stuff as well um and it is important when we with content packs and upgrading uh it's something that comes up when we upgrade content backs we can't just we're not going to just change what you have particularly if you if you've already customized it we can't change your job if you've already set the user and set the time um maybe you change the days that it's looking at we can't change we're not going to change your indicator source when you've already added an additional condition so because of that and and how you use analytics and right or wrong we can't change it from underneath you it's not like just changing the logic in the business rule but the analytics uh we can't we just we take the position we can't change them from underneath you um because of that some of the upgrades you may not see so it is it is always good if you are focusing on a certain area when this new release comes out like paris go take a look and look at the documentation for the content facts you already have um and whether you're using the solution library to upgrade or you just get some ideas and lift something or you get a personal developer instance and and uh install the fresh content pack take a look at what's there and how we're improving it um we are certainly learning along the way uh we get a lot of feedback from everybody else about what's useful and what's not useful so make sure that that you're looking at what's out there take advantage of that take advantage of the release notes to just quickly browse what those new solutions are and updated solutions as well because just because it's updated doesn't mean it's going to be upgraded in your instance because we respect your analytics enough not to just change them without your without your knowledge about it um uh and one kind of general question another question that came in uh had to do with what's the difference between indicators conditions on an indicator source versus conditions on each indicator um and this is there's a big difference between these so your indicator of source is what we're pulling back from the uh the database it is the the superset of your data and your indicator has can have additional conditions to filter it so my general guideline the general guideline i have has to do with i should if i haven't a condition that is on every indicator on the indicator source it shouldn't be on the indicator it should be on the indicator source i also j the vast majority majority of the time is um sorry if you have a condition that is on every indicator in your indicator source it should be on your indicator source not on each indicator that that's not a rule of thumb that's just how it should be it's more efficient um the second rule of thumb that i use is every indicator source should have at least one indicator that has no additional conditions there are a couple of exceptions to this but generally that rule serves me really really well because of every indicator has additional conditions then maybe i need to indicate two indicator sources um the except the main exception is the data is all mutually exclusive so if i'm looking at slas that breached today or slas that were due today well that is that is the set and every record is either going to go it either breached or didn't breach um although generally i'll have a third indicator i'll have three indicators on that total breached not breached um it's pretty simple pretty simple to have there and then again i have my rule that i should always have an indicator that has no additional conditions um the worst thing you can do and i have seen this is that somebody will have an indicator source which is all incidents no filters all incidents and then they have an indicator or that has additional conditions closed on today what that means is i'm pulling back and processing hundreds maybe thousands of times the amount of data my job just runs longer there's no benefit it's just extra overhead and extra time so make sure your indicator sources uh are as tight as they can be with the amount with the data you want every row in my indicator source i want to be going into one of my indicators um which again the easy way is if i have at least one indicator that has no additional conditions i know that's true okay a good question and really important to understand about where we're processing it so again indicator source gives me all my data back and then i'm applying a second level of filtering to my indicator if it is not in the indicator source it will not be in the indicator right so it's a two-stage filtering process and then a follow-up if if additional conditions used for multiple indicators with the same indicator source it will take longer to collect um the the the actual processing of the additional conditions is incredibly lightweight um so that shouldn't um hit you but it has to do with the number of rows of processes your your biggest indicator and scripts the the slow the thing that will slow your jobs down the most is scripts uh second to that is uh is the amount of data um the easiest thing is make sure you're not you're not pulling back data in your indicator source that you don't need so you always want to take a look at that is do i need every row i'm pulling back and in the same vein am i pulling back all incidents this month do i really need that or can i do all incidents this day run it daily and then use a time series so the smaller amount of data that we you know we don't want to reprocess the same thing over and over and get the same result so the number of incidents open today whether i do it monthly or i do it daily and sum it up monthly doesn't make a difference it just doesn't make a difference um and there are there are some things we get in the scale and what we want to do but ostensibly just make you know i want daily indicators i only want data for that day it's always a manageable amount um and it should run fast i i want my jobs to run in really 10 minutes or less 15 minutes or less i get concerned when i have multi-hour jobs um with the exception of i'm running cmdb and i'm running 10 million records that takes a little bit of time that i may not be able to get through that in 10 minutes but um most of my jobs i want to see running in 10 to 15 minutes or less and often in the or less category okay a few more minutes uh and hopefully this is this is helping all of you please go ahead and submit any other questions that you have um we have a few more in the queue ah really really good question um i'm seeing these all as uh anonymous so i don't know if these are all the same person or not but a question with upgrades um in upgrades where we're getting ready to get started with pa um and welcome to our office hours thank you for for uh learning a little bit about it before you dig into it would it make sense to upgrade first yes the simple answer is yes um personal developer instances are awesome because you can go play around with something the way i would look at it right explore it see what's there and not be afraid about what's going on um on your sub prods you certainly can you can see what's going on but uh we there are lots and lots of updates uh i believe our last office hours we talked about the new content facts that are out there and content packs that get upgraded and up once you've activated the plug-in the trap we can run into is i activate a content pack and then upgrade i might miss something so don't activate content packs until you're ready to really look at them and if you have an upgrade coming um you can look at the documentation to see if it's been touched if it's been updated um but if i didn't know and i had the ability i would wait until i upgrade at least on my sub broad to understand what's going on because that way i make sure i get the latest and greatest and again there are new there is an amazing amount of content produced every each and every release that just gets there's more and more so before you start building with pa make sure you look at what's available to help you get started it might get you everything you need there's some amazing content packs some of them are some of the solutions we have are just more customized is always customized so some of them might just you 80 there but 80 there is a lot better than no you know than zero so make sure you look at those content packs also make sure you look at the the community posts that we have about getting started and all the available training that's out there all that stuff in um in the community all all the amazing stuff and now learning so lots of great content there but if i have the choice don't turn the content back on until you're ready and if you're about to upgrade upgrade first and i'm going to answer we have time for one more question and then we'll wrap up having to do with um create when does it make sense to create more indicator sources to reduce the amount of indicators sharing the same source generally you want to combine all your indicators into the same source that gives you uh the same result set because the data can change from underneath it can change from underneath you so the the data will be more consistent when it's all in one indicator source and it also means i only have to run one query to the database to pull the data back so if you break your indicators into separate sources or put them into separate jobs generally what i would do is use the same indicator source but just put them in separate jobs we can reduce the amount of memory we use but your cumulative time will actually go up so instead of having one 20-minute job i might have two 15-minute jobs that's needed at some point in time but generally we're i'm gonna i'm gonna default to including things that logically belong together into the same indicator source into the same job so they run at the same time and i have more consistency and it's just easier to manage and better when we hit some levels of of scale we might break them into separate jobs and again i still don't actually need separate indicator sources but separate jobs i only have one thing to manage instead of two things to manage um and i keep them logically connected and the jobs they can generally run in parallel you just want to make sure you don't you want to run them a minute or two apart so they they load bounce to different nodes in your instance if you fire a bunch of jobs in the same second at the exact same minute um they can all go to the same note they actually probably will go to the same node which can then cause problems but if you stagger even by a couple minutes the the jobs can go out but all that has to do with when there is a problem let's talk about that problem um outside of that i want it to be in the same indicator source in the same job it's easier to manage it's easier to understand it's easier to operate and only when i have an issue would i then go to breaking things apart okay um we're uh we're running low on time um i appreciate all your questions great great stuff uh okay [Music] so i'm gonna go ahead and bring up a couple slides to help us wrap up here okay and again thanks thomas for the the great demo i'd love to see how you explain it it's uh it's really helpful to see to see how do i navigate through these things okay as a reminder as we go through uh this session was recorded we will get it posted uh once we get the video ready so it should be later this evening um and we'll get the recording posted it'll be on youtube if you subscribe to that channel which you can you can do here um and in the community the post will be there along with with thomas deck so i know that's really useful to reference a lot of great links in there which aren't necessarily the easiest to remember but when you have the link it's easy to copy and paste and those links will be in that post as well so uh check back tomorrow and you should be able to get this session share with your friends next time next time we're going to talk about predictive intelligence so we focus a lot on performance analytics and reporting but many of us if we have one of our pro packages also have access to predictive intelligence a great complement to performance analytics it's not uh performance analytics or predictive intelligence or reporting they all complement each other and we're going to talk a little bit about what do you get with predictive intelligence for those of us that have entitlement to it what's it going to help us do and what do i get out of box we're not going to go through a bunch of training but we just want to make sure we're all exposed to what's there and again i know a lot of us have entitlement to it so we should be looking at it to help help us solve some of those problems some of those really difficult things to solve with performance analytics are easy to solve with predictive intelligence so we'll be going through that in two weeks um this session was a pretty direct result from customers asking questions to us directly in the community following up to the session a couple months ago keep telling us what you want to hear you know we're we are here to answer your questions to help you succeed we cannot succeed unless you do um there is a post uh linked off of the office hours page for you to put in your suggestions so i know we got a couple of them here i will take note of those but you can go ahead and go in this in the um uh go to the community get the old office hour sessions and also suggest new ones for us that we can present to you and until next time use the community share your expertise we have some of the world's experts on the phone that we're not talking that we're listening in um please share your expertise and leverage the expertise of servicenow thomas and i are there thomas is answering questions all day long nowadays a lot of great partners a lot of other customers so share and leverage your expertise so you have a question ask it there um that that post that i referenced at the beginning you'll you can find that on the community if you follow those you're gonna get better answers just you're gonna you're gonna get more concise answers faster i my suggestion is always use screenshots but lots of great things in there catch up on the previous office hours so i think in this session we've referenced uh two or three previous sessions those are there for you along with the recordings the decks a quick recap of what's there and again great content for you to go back to uh performance analytics reporting predictive intelligence service now is not perfect yet we're not we're not there but we can get there with your help so make sure you're submitting ideas in the portal you know you ask a question how do i do this and your answer is you can't that's not the end right if you think yeah but i want to do this please go into the idea portal which is at the top of the community and submit your ideas if you have a few minutes go look through those ideas and vote up the ones that other people have submitted if they're going to help you um we we do consistently look at the idea portal um we're planning the next release right now and those things that that you guys say you want of course we're gonna listen um so please use the idea portal that is that is your best mechanism to get things in the product to help you succeed and take some training um so again lots of free and self-paced training and now learning um you can revis outside of performance analytics go you can expand what you're doing whether it's servicenow fundamentals virtual agent fundamentals predictive intelligence fundamentals um every subject area has that there's just so much training and they vary from a five minute class um a five minute kind of point class on what you want to do to a three-day session um everything in between and most of it is self-paced uh and the self-paced stuff is is for the time being free as far as i know um so just take advantage of that you can you can learn so much the k20 labs are there they will not be there forever um it's been clarified to me they will not be there forever so if you haven't taken advantage of those please go take advantage of those all right and i think with that we're gonna wrap up uh thank you for taking the time to listen thank you for the excellent questions today i really appreciate that um pushing us uh helps everybody so i'm glad for that feedback and we look forward to seeing you in two weeks thank you again thomas really appreciate that presentation yep thank you