good morning good afternoon and good evening thank you for joining us for performance analytics and reporting office hours we're going to go ahead and get started so as a reminder as we as we get started this session is absolutely for you we're here to answer your questions give you some fresh perspectives please uh interject with your questions in the q a section if you have them right now everybody is is on mute but if we do have a question we may unmute you if that's okay with you to get some follow-up detail but please remember this session is for you and we want to help you that is our main goal here all this session is being recorded it will be posted to youtube and in the community uh either later today or tomorrow as well as all of our other sessions are posted there as well so if you go back to the community where you registered for this session you'll find a list of our previous topics and links to those recordings in those decks and you'll see some of the upcoming topics as well there's a playlist on the youtube as well if you want to subscribe that will remind you every time there's a new one and this is for you we want to answer the questions that you that you have the cases you have the use cases the problems you're seeing there is an article that you'll see linked in the community as well about the uh office hours topics we should cover i know last time we covered one that was specifically asked for and we want to hear what you would like us to talk about and we will cover those in future sessions and i'm not going to stop talking about it but the k20 labs are available for you and now learning great great content there i believe we have a dozen or so performance analytics and reporting labs there for you to take they are hands-on you get the instance you get to work through it so don't miss that opportunity uh if you have some time on your hands head out to now learning and take advantage of those k-20 labs and as we're as we're going we're ready to start our our main session today today we have thomas davis one of our outbound product managers talking about the cmdb query builder um and how we use that in reporting i know this might be a new topic for for many of us um really important stuff so i appreciate you guys you guys coming and listening and i am looking forward to what thomas has to say hey there thomas i'm here thanks adam i appreciate it uh so let me share my screen here there we go everyone should be seeing the same thing as before looks great let me drag this out of the way here all right great so again uh like adam said my name is thomas davis and uh today we're going to talk a little bit about the cmdb query builder and how we can leverage it in reporting so the first thing that we kind of want to talk about here is just kind of give some um information in general you know what is csdm and you know the cmdb framework and things of that nature just so you have some understanding of that so when we talk about common services what we're really focusing on is standards and the definitions it takes to have an effective csdm which is the cmdb framework of our data model so the combination of having standards and the definition together inside the cmdb framework provides to us the common service data model um as you're seeing here on the screen and you know that framework is definitely important and you'll see that as we go forward here building out our queries a little bit later on so what is a service and a service offering so when we get into the the cmdb query builder you'll you'll see that there are services that are out there and um there are a few different types of services that are there we have and first we have the application service and this is an instance or unique deployment of a business application this is specific to its environment whether it be dev tests qa prod etc these are truly unique deployments of your applications next we have technical service we reference this as being the provider of technology that the business will consume or sell depending on your particular business model and then we have business service this is the consumer of the technology so another portion of it is what's called a service offering and so we have services but also another level the service offers these become extremely important to the ci this is where slas are stored for the service where we keep our data on who owns or manages the service this is where we have the support group that helps with auto routing on incidents the assignment group for change so it can be auto populated with changes other elements like identifying its criticality identifying any other commitments that along with that go along with the particular offering itself so again these come into play uh as we go further along so what is the cmdb query builder so the cmdb query builder allows you to easily build complex infrastructure and service queries you can span multiple cmdb classes and you can also see tables that aren't cmdb tables they're called non-cmdb tables that involve many ci's that are connected with different relationships so the query builder provides a canvas which you drag the ci classes that you want included in the query which we'll see here in a little bit and then you add relationships that you can use and or operators between the classes ci classes and then define relationship properties uh for the query and then you can see some of the roles that are required here um as well in order to do this so inside the query builder there's two different types of uh queries that you could actually do so the first which is what we're going to go over uh today the cmdb query again is a query that you know queries infrastructure for ci classes and non-cmdb tables when you create the query you can add tables from a list of non-cmdb tables the list of non-tv tables include subsets of tables with the system such as asset task problem things of that nature which have references to configuration items um this is something that's probably not new to you but here you can expose those a lot easier um and then of course there's a system property where you can actually limit uh the non-cmdb tables that you want uh people to choose from if you cho so desire to do that and then the other one is a service map inquiry so this query is framed with application service map you define the pattern and query for application uh that have patterns in their definition the relationships and service mapping queries are matched by single-level direct relationships which is similar to cmdb queries in addition they are also matched by multi-level indirect relationships a query for a relationship between two ci classes is satisfied with two ci classes and connected by intermediate classes that are not specified in the query so this gives you a little bit more functionality um for the server side service mapping query as opposed to the cmdb query itself so uh before we get started we just kind of want to throw out a use case that will help us as we go forward when we start creating uh the things that we're going to do so uh very generic use case but it will again help us see what we're looking for so uh we have issues related to hoover's but they aren't always obvious so we want to check the incidents against service that depend on hoovers regardless of what they are and hoover's is just a sales perspective prospect information source is all that is some may be familiar with it some may not okay so the cmdb query builder is as simple as going to the filter navigator typing in cmdb query builder and selecting it and this will open it up and actually what it does it'll open up into a new tab um and this is kind of what the the or this is what the tab will look like when you when you opens up when it opens up in a new tab so basically what we'll do here is we'll create we'll start with the creation of the process of our query so you know after you click you click create new you name it uh in our case we're going to name it hoover incidents and then we make sure that we have cmdb query selected and then we just simply click create so this is our canvas so what i wanted to do first was kind of talk about the canvas and the properties and things of that nature that you actually get with the canvas before we start building so it'll kind of help you out along the way and you'll know what you have so first let's look at our filter on the left side of the screen so this is our filter um looks very familiar familiar to any other uh search capabilities inside of the platform and here basically what we can do is we can look for what we want to search for we can search for cis we can search for services associated them this is a hierarchy list and you know you find what you want and then you drag it out onto the canvas and then again there we go and then the next is the non-cmdb tables so these are tables that are not in the cmdb directly um can it cannot be the first starting node of your query and you cannot connect the cmdb class to two non-cmdb tables at the same time again we would find what we need and drag it to the canvas and next we have save query so you would use this if you had any queries that um any service mapping queries that you had already had you could actually see those drag those out onto the canvas as well and then you could create combinations of using service mapping query and the cmdb query itself and then on the other side of the screen we have our properties and filters so in the properties section this is where you'll establish relationships between your nodes that you'll see here uh in a moment and determine what level the relationships are and if you need to add related items between the nodes or whatnot the ui notations will tell you when you have a relationship which is a full line you'll see here in a moment if information is missing such as a relationship type or whatnot then it would be you would see a red asterisk in the center of that line and again you'll see that here in a moment you would also see levels of the relationship and the number of relationship types included for the connection and then the filters in the apply filter section this gives you the ability to add filters directly to the nodes themselves and you'll actually see those filters so you and again you can use the and or operators in your filters you can add filters at the node level directly which we'll do uh here in a little bit so again this will actually show you what those filters are as you build those out based on which node that you have selected so what's a starting node so a start node is basically the start point for your query and it's noted by a gray background the first class that you drag to the canvas becomes your start node of the query and you cannot select a different start node once you have that particular one that is your start node now you could obviously delete anything that you have dragged out onto your canvas and start over and that would give you a new start node but in general the very first one that you drag out there is your start node so in complex queries the start node must always be the only node connected to an and or operator if you try to connect a second node to an operator that the start node is connected to the query will fail and prompt you to select a different start node so uh and you and again you'll see that here in a moment so our relationship property so when you connect classes on the canvas the query builder will display the connection properties to the right side bar when you can configure the part you can configure the properties of relationships such as relationships directions so we talked about this a little bit ago and for service mapping queries you can configure where they query for related or unrelated cis so this image here kind of shows you a little bit of what it's going to look like so now let's get into actually creating something so what we want to do is we want to search for business service and we want to drag that over to the screen and you can see here that we're simply just dragging it over notice that the color is gray this is our indicate indication that is the first node in our query everything will build from it when you click on the nodes you can see the properties and the apply filters if there were if something was applied you'd already see that there click on the node again and you'll see and notice the ability to add property columns uh to appear in the query result result so as we add these out on the canvas every one that we drag out you can actually add columns from those particular that particular data so you actually see that in the result once you run it so again this is our first node and again your indicator is that it is gray and you'll notice going forward that the other ones that we drag out will not so next we want to grab a non-cmdb table so we're going to search for incidents and we're going to drag that out and now we'll need to establish a relationship between business service and incident so again if you notice once we click the first square and the second square you'll see the green line and of course there's the red asterisk that we talked about earlier so that red asterisk is there is because we have not determined what that relationship is going to be so for here we're going to say the reference column for this is the business service so that has established that relationship between the two and it understands that the incident is going to connect itself to the business service based on the business service itself so again this is as simple as as it is just dragging things out so from here we can actually see some results so if we click save and then we click run it'll actually open up a new tab and it'll show the results that we actually have so here we've actually been able to connect two business services with the incident and here it defaults to 100 so make sure that you you click on load all results this will become important later on when we create uh schedules and what not with it so you want to make sure that all of that data is actually seen so because we're not seeing a whole lot of data here and obviously we want to look for hoover specific incidents things that are related to hoover we need to add a little bit more to this query to to see that so next we're going to go back over and we're going to click on sandy classes again and then we're going to look for the ci that is hoover so all right so we're going to grab configuration item out and then we're going to actually add a filter to our ci that's going to look for hoover so again we join it up to the business service and here you just click on the box again you can see that it's a green line with an asterisk and basically what we're going to tell it is that we don't really care what the relationship is we want any relationship type that is out there so we select that and now we have uh those relationships built and you can see you know it's recycling now but you can see that it actually tells you what level you can tell it tells you the and or operators all of that directly onto the canvas and again we're looking for any relationship that is out there so we can see any of those hoover up particular incidents so here we can click save and run and we can see that when we run that and it and it opens up in a new tab here again there we go uh that we have quite a bit of results over 12 000 different results so let's let's dwindle that down a little bit let's filter that down a little bit so we want to add a filter to the ci that's going to look for hoover and then let's also look at incidents where they were created on this year so all we simply do is we go back to our canvas and you notice that when you click on any one of the nodes there is a filter button there that is very familiar same as in a platform and here we're going to look for name that starts with hoover so this is going to bring back all the ci's that start with hoover but then to go a little bit further let's look at incidents that were created on this year and these filters are applied directly to the query and then we'll click save and run again once this is done and we'll actually be able to see that we have dwindled that down to quite a bit less now we have 388 different results that was fast but it was 388 so now that we've dwindled everything down and we think that we have our query the way that we need it let's build a report off of it let's see what we can do there so you can create reports uh from the query builder uh there are some steps that you have to do prior to it being ready to use so let's walk through those uh and here are the roles the roles that are required to be able to do reporting inside of the cmdb query builder so a couple things so after you create and save your query you can create a dynamic report from that query that you add that you will update and show the latest query results couple of things that have to be set prior to building a report the create report button is only activated after the query has been saved the query has a schedule and the entire set of query results is present after query run and this is what i was talking about earlier where you click on the button once you see your results it says load all results so the initial report is created it's based off the results of the initial run and of the save query every time that it is updated with the with the related latest results it shows that there so a big thing to understand is that if you change the definition the query definition itself you will have to create a new report because the query and the existing report are no longer in sync these prior to you actually changing it the scheduled the schedule that we create will always run that same particular uh report so again if you change that query anywhere just remember that you have to save and run that report again you don't have to recreate the schedule the same schedule will work but you have to make sure that you save that report and or create a new report and you can use the existing schedule to to run the information for that and basically when you create these they in themselves become report sources data sources so we can use reports this report source and another report we can use the data source in pa we can use it you know in those things uh like any any other way that you do anything else so so how do we create a report uh from the cmdb uh builder so when we create a report like i said it's essentially just creating a schedule report so if you've created schedule reports before this screen will look very familiar to you so it's passing over the name it's passing over the particular query and then you can decide when you want to run it for our case here we're running it on demand but you can schedule it to run as often as you as you would like and then you then you click submit and you have it scheduled it's that simple so let's create now that we have it scheduled now that we've ran it we've decided on what our query is we've made sure that all results are loaded uh when we view it and we created a schedule now the create report button is actually visible so now you can click on that and when you click on that again very familiar screen here it takes you directly to the report designer it passes over all of the information so the report name is set to the name of the save query the source type is data source the data source is a table in which the queries results are stored and then the query sys id is the id of the latest run of the query which is important based on what you've created so again if you were to create something new or change then that sys id would obviously change so you can see all of that information directly in the report designer so let's say that once you when you build that that it's just not enough data and obviously that is not with only three columns so you have the same ability um as any other report that you have which is very familiar to dot walk and we've added those together now you can actually get to any of those and you can add that data directly over and uh and when you save the report the report itself is saved with those particular columns and in our case we needed more so we have more value and actually see what we're doing so again in the report designer is no different than any other time that you've done it grab those those columns that you want move those over and then when you hit okay i added quite a few here and then when you hit ok it'll actually bring all of those particular columns back just like any other report that you have here we go i think that's the last one i'm removing those top ones at the top those are the ones that are with just the creation of the report itself so we run it and and it recycled very fast but it had the results that we were looking for so now that we have a data source slash report source we can essentially use that inside of pa like you've used any other report source data source if you've done that before so again the great thing about this is that if you create these queries and they're very specific it gives you the governance that you need now that you've saved it as a report and it's generated that report source the governance around that helps you you know going forward to make sure that people are reporting on it exactly the way that it needs to be reported on so here you can see a screenshot of where i've taken that same report source and i've put it inside of an indicator source and it automatically knows the facts table and um you can see that the sys id there's javascript there and this id is part of that so it knows exactly where to look for that going forward and then you can actually use the same exact thing in a breakdown so if you were to use an existing breakdown and you needed to map you could map directly to that same table and then use those uh things that are in your tables directly in a breakdown so if you had an existing one you could use that or you could create a new one and the mapping and all of those things work exactly the way so you can see here that i've used that query and i've mapped to the column that i want to work and now this breakdown mapping will actually work so here you can see further that it's we've connected it to the particular indicator that uh we have and that incident state is there on that particular indicator and here you can see a score card where we've taken that same exact query that we've used inside query builder although very generic and it's in its self but we have been able to break it down by those particular uh states and now we can see that for this year that there have been quite a bit of incidents that were related to hoover um there are those other ones that are closed and these are the ones that are still in progress so again uh as you go further and further along you can use these things directly in reporting or pa and really build as much as you possibly can based on the relationships that you need and the relationships that are there that you can establish inside of those queries so what are some takeaways so cndb query builder excuse me gives the ability to create dynamic reports uh queries and reports and performance analytics so the big one that i think would probably be the highlight is in some cases you can actually use this in place of a database fuse database view that you have to create so what does that do that saves a lot of time right because you have to actually go to admins to create database views so here you could potentially create some of the same things that were needed in database views existently and you could create those directly in the query builder so it gives a lot more power to you at your fingertips to create some things so and again so since we're able to get report sources from it it again gives you the ability to have some governance around the data that's actually being reported on so the same way that you would create a report inside a report designer and have all the different filters that you have and then save that and then save it as a report source and let your uh people use those essentially query builder is the same exact thing you build it all out in the query builder set your filters to what you want them to be establish those relationships that you want them to be you save that it is established report source and then boom you have you're able to apply the same governance now understand that again if you go back in at any point and change that query then a new report would have to be generated for that so i know that i've given you a lot um hopefully not too fast but there are some great um references and recommendations uh that you should do to really bring you up to speed even more on this there's a couple great labs that are out there from k20 drive real value and common service data model that talks about the cmdb as well and then learning uh or make better decisions with query builder itself which again really talks about and shows some uh building of queries and um you know there's probably a lot of use cases that are out there hopefully uh all everybody that's on the call their head is sort of spinning and thinking of different use cases where they can actually use this so i would definitely encourage you to go and get some training um these were videos that i pre-recorded here that you're seeing so um you will want to kind of go a little bit slower so you can understand things like that but definitely start with those two labs and then of course there's always servicenow documentation that is out there and here's a couple of good ones that you know basically uh building queries with the cmdb query builder and then also creating reports in the query builder as well so go to those look at those if you need help and you know again try to sort of push the envelope a little bit and think of different use cases where you can actually do this a lot of times the visual aspect of creating those queries and dragging those those out onto the canvas uh is a lot easier as opposed to you know knowing uh the names of particular uh tables or whatnot or ci's that are out there so having that search filter right at the canvas level will will help you create a lot of those um and with that are there any questions all the questions are coming in all right so let me uh ask you a couple of these as we come in okay um uh the first question can the query builder be used in other areas of service now other than cmdb so right now uh it only supports uh you know cmdb however there are some updates to it that are coming in paris that may give the ability uh to do that but i know that uh currently right now it is uh just cmdb however the non-cmdb tables kind of can give you the ability to look for some of the other things that perhaps that you're looking for that are inside of the platform so understand that you can look for some things there the biggest thing is whether or not you can establish a relationship between whatever's in that non-seem to be table and something that is in uh the cmdb classes themselves but but at this point there needs to be an anchor and it's gotta touch cmdb exactly it's got to touch it's got to be able to establish a relationship great mobile all right so you you were the one who talked to us about mobile uh a couple sessions ago um can i display these reports uh well this the question is can i just uh just build a report and display it on on the mobile app um so we'll i'll answer the first part if you are looking to just display reports in mobile there is an office hours that thomas gave a few sessions ago that really goes through how to get started with mobile but you want to talk about these reports in mobile so these particular reports again you're creating a report right so it's in the report designer so anything once you've created that query and you've saved it and you hit create report it's directly in the report designer so when you save that and you can establish permissions to it sharing permissions or whatnot as soon as it's a report and you have actually created and saved it it's no different than any other report that you have created directly in the report designer so therefore yes you can see it on a mobile device now actually creating if that was going to be the next question creating queries directly on the mobile device i don't know that i would want to do that but i don't think that you can access it via mobile it'd probably be a really small screen but let me find out uh exactly more about that so uh if if that's a question that whoever asked that because i actually can't see the questions here whoever asked that if they maybe want to uh generate a question in the community and tag me and let me get a little bit more information about that just to make sure that that is if it is or it is not uh possible at this point but general general recommendation is is using it is if you you can build the report in the uh at your computer but then you will be able to access it and view it from mobile correct if it's been if it's been set up to to view on mobile like adam was saying if you go back and look at the office house from a few weeks ago if you've done all of those things then absolutely you can see that report um another question about about roles uh so i think you mentioned it earlier but can you recap the query builder what roles do i need to be able to use it is something that every itil user can use or is there a specific role for it so let me go back uh to that particular slide so so here are the roles that are uh required and uh so a cmdb query builder read to only view and run same queries and the cmdb query builder they're contained for idle idle admin and assets so if you if a user has those any one of those three they would already have the ability or those are the particular roles that you could sign for viewing if someone just needed a view the query that somebody else had built out then you would give them the view one but if they needed to create them then that was the role there that you would actually give them as well great and then uh another question we came in having to do with some of the other reporting um does this allow for for you to join tables that cannot be dot walked in standard reporting so um so again this kind of goes back to i sort of like the the very the very first question about using it any in other other places inside of the platform you have to be able to establish a relationship between the ci at the at the business service level the service offering level you have to be able to establish a relationship between something there and something else in the platform in order for you to actually use the query builder if there's no direct or even indirect relationship if there's no way to tie the two together then um then you unfortunately wouldn't be able to to actually see that inside the query builder itself so when you look for you know in the non-cmdb tables uh when you search there if there's a particular table that doesn't come up then there's there's no way to actually establish a relationship there so that would sort of define whether or not you could or you could not so it doesn't let us um join two like non-cmdb tables that don't have that don't have a reference that that correct string that matches that do some of the things that we might be asking for but it does allow us to traverse the relationship table in cmdb which you generally cannot walk through and you can't not walk through multiple relationships so correct it um if it's seemed to be related yes but if it's not seem to be related then no it doesn't let you do other like joining on username or something to that effect and and i know that this is um getting better and adam even yourself could probably speak to that better than i uh but i know that this is getting better with every release and i know that in the paris release there's quite a few uh things that are new things that are actually coming to this um as well so you know um it may not happen now but i would i would think you know generally in the future maybe that's that's something there but but even adam if you want to take a moment to just speak on how how much better this has become in in the past few years sure and and this pertains to all of us in different versions where uh the demo we saw this was in orlando is that correct thomas uh yes this is orlando correct so so this is what we have in orlando in paris it looks slightly different it's a little clearer uh when you look at the starting nodes marked but um or like if you can do in orlando you can do it in paris but i think there are definitely improvements in paris but if you go back i believe the query builder was introduced in madrid it didn't let us use other tables you could only do cmdb to cmdb we were able to in new york at other tables but we couldn't save them they're through the releases and it depends where you are um there are different uh there's different capabilities so if you're in madrid some of this stuff may not work out well for you uh but once you get to orlando you're gonna be able to do everything that we saw today and embarrass the improvements there's a lot of effort being put into this um but be aware if you are sitting in new york um not everything in this demo will work it doesn't work with getting it to work with pa is much more challenging uh so it's there a lot of improvements have come and a lot of roommates are going to come so make sure you really the really release notes and and uh stay tuned with us um as we'll go through these okay a few more questions that have come in um and please keep please keep sending them to us so sharing reports uh in sharing these reports to the recipients of the reports need to need the role to use the query builder to to view the view do i need the role so um that's a that's a great question and i actually need to look that up directly but i believe that uh having the the view role the cmdb view role would allow someone to see that data because that essentially is what allows them to see the query builder and the actual table that uh was viewed but you can find those particular um tables inside the instance and obviously you could apply uh any sort of um you know security or sharing permission that you would want directly on those tables if you had to but having the view would allow people to to see the underlying data that's inside of the report and that's a great question and i actually would like to look a little bit deeper into that to see exactly does it take on the report viewer role since you've created it in report designer so i need to find um that particular one out and again i cannot see who's asking that but adam if you could just tell me their name and i'll get back to them well the list of questions and we'll put that in into the uh the update to this yeah about that one it's a great question about it for somebody who doesn't have the itil role would they be able to see it because if they do correct anybody with itil is not going to have a problem but if they don't have itil would they be able to yeah i will find that out and when i actually um update the community blog on this i'll make sure that that information is in there great okay another question um and comp we're gonna go with this first that query builder really opens up standardization and optimization options with report sources yes yeah it does um and leveraging report sources these are we've talked about report sources in the past they're they're they're good um this allows us to get get it in there as well and i i want to make the note too that every query you run ends up creating a table for you um and one question that that we're going to try and be clear about too is if you create a table are there any licensing implications and this is the query builder tables are exempt from uh because they're not counted as custom tables even though it does create a new table for you um and the question part of that was uh can we use report sources in interactive filters you can use interactive filters on reports with report sources but i don't i'm reading this now you i you could build yeah i think you could no i don't think you can build an interactive filter where you just define a report source it's the interactive filters are on tables but that's a really good um idea um so if we come back to that um i i'm gonna take a look at that but i don't believe you can do that today and if you want to submit that in the idea portal we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment but um to be able to define interactive filters in a new way based on with the conditions in a report source seems like pretty uh pretty interesting idea all right here's here's another one for you this this one might be a little bit more challenging um what would you suggest we take in into consideration to select our first node how do i know where to start yeah that is a good question um so let's take another use case for example so if let's say that you were curious about um the clusters that were um the the unix clusters that were on a particular uh server out there so um when you think about it like that so so probably the first place that you want to start would be the server itself the hardware right so you would want to look for ci hardware and then find a server and then you would want to bring out perhaps a service offering or business service where you're looking for a particular unix information a nodes or anything like that so um i don't know that necessarily answers your question but i guess the point that i'm making is you know it's about figuring out what it what it really is you know in that use case you're saying okay i want to see the servers i want to i want to find the servers that have you know unix on there and then the clusters that are associated with that particular uh unix that are on that particular server so when you think about it like that server is where we want to where we want to start right so in our particular use case we just wanted to establish the the ability between a business service an incident and then applied the ci so in that case right so it kind of was the last thing that we added as opposed to the very first thing uh could you start with uh hoover and then work your way around you probably could uh but it really comes down to um what those those relationships are and uh what is most paramount and i think for a situation like i just said it would be the server so identifying what is that sort of first thing uh for you really comes down to establishing what's the end goal of the data that you're actually you know trying to see and i and i don't know if that necessarily answers your question and and i gotta wonder i think that that's one of those questions where um any any given person could probably give it a little bit differently um and we have a um a gentleman here servicenow his name is scott and he's actually called the cmdb whisperer and uh that that would be a a question that i think that i could uh definitely ask him and uh that way if we have a more definitive answer that would i think sound a lot better than than probably what i'm um given right now and i could definitely add that into uh the blog as well when i post this because again i think that it really comes down to the individual circumstance and of course the person that's actually creating the query um as well and adam i don't know if there's anything that you want to add to that but i think you know asking the cmdb whisperer that might be the best uh thing and and adding that into the blog i do well here's here's my take on that um so given the group of people that we have we have here we're we're mainly focused on analytics i've been working with servicenow for seven and a half years and i've tried to stay clear of cmdb for that time right it's just not something i needed to do and certainly work with task and build custom apps and lots of performance analytics but cmdb i've been able to stay clear of the point of this session was to scare you and realize that we that's not going to be the world that we all live in anymore we're going to have to understand cmdb csdm is coming it's it's the recommendation we have it's part of servicenow um and i we should have put a poll up you know are you scared or excited or something else um i'm a little of both going through this because i got to learn more about seemed to be in relationships and how to leverage them the what we wanted you to get out of this was there is news there are new applications to use there's a new world that we have to be able to be familiar with uh i highly recommend you take you take the lab so there's the csdm lab um i think the query thomas had the list the query builder lab there's training and now learning i highly encourage you to go out into now learning and take some of these classes take them now get ahead of the ahead of the curve um some of this some of these things are going to make your life easier quickly uh they're they're going to make your life immediately easier things that were a hassle to do before particularly with views and where you needed your admin to do something an update set now you can just do um so so just i i really want to scare you into taking these into taking these labs and these classes you're going to be able to add a lot of value to your organization and if you don't the csdm is going to come bite you uh so we wanted to give you this opportunity to give you a preview of what what's possible what we're talking about and point you to some resources so that you are well prepared to help your organization really thrive and just take advantage of everything that's in service now the cstm stuff make will make our lives better it will make our workflows better it'll make our analytics better it'll make our companies run better but it's different and it's something that that we need to learn and you're in a good place to to do that right now okay a couple more questions um and please keep them keep coming in uh if i understand uh if i understand correctly the user any itil user can create a query built a cmdb query builder and can create a data source a report source would the list of report source grow sources grow to be an unmanageable list um yeah i mean i think that that's that's a that's a good point and it's it's probably not um anything that's indifferent than you know the fact that um you know people can create they can can save reports now as report sources and you know i think it's it really comes down to um you know the business itself and what restrictions and what permissions or whatnot that um it allows um you know you you maybe you want to assign that um directly and not give someone necessarily the the idle role if you have that you know if you're in a position to do that um i know that you know a few of the things that we did here you know scheduling reports and report sources and things like that there are definitely uh businesses out there that really restrict that um so you know again i think you have to look at the business itself and what what is allowed and what is not but um you know it's a good point i mean i think if something is left wide open it does obviously open up the the chances of you know the control factor uh sort of um being taken away so again i think that comes down to the use case of the business itself and what it what it wants to do and and then establishing the roles that are you know directly you know necessary for uh the people that are going to be creating these things you know i i don't know that the average just average user people that aren't necessarily on this call would would search for cmdb query builder and do something with it but anything i guess is possible so i think that you you have to as yourself as a business decide with how those roles are going to necessarily work out um adam i know if you want to add something to that yeah i mean there is an issue here where an itil user can't create a report source today you need i think you need to be a report admin um so thomas you always see that because you're always a report admin but yeah our general users can't always create report sources um so yeah this is where we could start seeing report sources we wouldn't expect um and and specifically the names the report source and it takes on the name of the query so you can run into duplicate names then so i think there is an issue for us to to look at and how do we do it um if i were dealing with this today um i'd want to be managing and watching my report sources that are based off of these tables the tables all start with them cmd query builder i think something to that effect so it's easy to tell the report sources that are that came from cmdb query builder it's something i want to watch and and it is something as we're as we're all stretching our our legs getting into query builder and reporting um we i'll tell you thomas and i have a list of ideas on how we make this better but i want to hear yours as well as your as you're working with this if you have concerns you have questions post them in the community and put in the ideas in the idea portal so we can make it better again the query builder has grown very rapidly each release and adding new capabilities and so if this is something we need to watch and maintain then that's what we need to do so we would love to hear that feedback and it's of course incredibly valuable and i took that question down too and i'm going to find out a little bit more information about that as well to to to make sure that um maybe there's there's a restriction somewhere that i'm just i just didn't put in this uh slide deck that that you can do so i'll find out about that as well yeah and there is lots of documentation in the labs that go through details um 20 minutes will not replace taking uh spending a couple hours on in the lab and really getting your hands dirty and going through each of those things okay uh using query builder can we report on related items uh downstream relationships well i mean that's that's uh essentially what you sort of saw today was you know we we started at um you know tying business services to um to incidents in general and then we went further to say okay we want the ci to be able to um you know uh show us just hoover and we connected that directly to the business service um as well so there there are some um some pretty dynamic uh queries that are they're out there that i have actually seen that are you know four five six seven eight levels uh down in and you know uh a lot of those are um potentially things that you could get to from a related items list um inside of uh reporting or an indicator source or things or like that but that's just that's basically establishing those relationships um you know knowing what the reference is and establishing those particular relationships so there there's definitely multiple levels that you can go to um and again if there is a reference like adam was talking about earlier if there is a reference between the two things that you want to bring together then you can definitely establish that um directly in the query builder and in the query builder so one of the examples the example we saw with incidents in the query that's saved that's run on the scheduled basis you have you have incidents but then the dot walking is done in the report so if i want to if i want to say give me all the ins the example we had if i want to see all the incidents that dealt with the service that was supported by hoover's good i have that but now if i want to add more conditions like that are in the finance department or not in the finance department i certainly can do that we have all once you're in report designer you have this one save data set that that's refreshing on the scheduled basis but the rest of it is just dot walks um all that that works the same and the same thing we should have related list conditions okay uh how do i retire something when tables are created in query builder are they permanent or is there some type of of cleanup job or scheduling we we schedule the report how long does it last so the the table itself that is created from the query if you have a schedule right so you have to have a schedule in order for you to create a report that table will continuously be wrote to you know depending on how often that you run the schedule it will continuously write to that particular table that that report is using so uh if you if you create a new report meaning you've changed the uh the definitions inside the query itself if you've changed that particular report and it has a new table now that it's writing to then you can definitely go and remove that particular table but understand that if there is anything that is tied to that particular uh table if there's any other reports that were created directly to it in report designer or whatnot that you know there would be impact uh there but if there is no um impact and those reports themselves have been retired that are looking at the data that you want to retire then you can absolutely remove that as well um i and i believe the i believe the data gets purged out of the tables at some at some interval so there is some cleanup process for it but i'm not sure what it is um i i don't know if there's an expiration like if you haven't refreshed the data in so long delete it um but if there is there's going to be some settings for that because some of this i actually only need to refresh once you know on demand so we don't know when you when you can do it um so there might be some manual cleanup that you want to look at but and i know in terms of data i believe we do purge out the stale data at some point but that that would be covered more in the c in the query builder lab and the query builder documentation for those specific details and i'll and i'll find that out as well and add that we're gonna have a nice long list of information for you yeah it's great uh okay i just uh clarify one that one that came in about the downstream having to do with ip connections and yeah that's understanding the relationships in in the queer in cmdb you can query pretty much anything like i want to know all we use tubers data because that's that's what we had in our in our demo set but certainly you could say give me all the services that depend on um you know this virtual server on this ip uh you'd eventually be able to build that that that is the power that is why query builder exists is to be able to do those types of dependencies and traverse the the relationship hierarchy you know what's consumed by depends i whatever relationships you're defining you you can tune all those so it can get complicated you have to really understand your query uh your cmdb but the query builder will let you query it whereas today if you did that you'd have to build some massive single purpose views um that may have performance problems and if you've queried cmdb with some of those views you felt those queer those performance problems this allows us to shift that to maybe uh once a day you know how often do my ips and everything change anyways so once a day or once every half hour whatever you need to be for your use case i'm saving i'm saving that data and then i'm i'm able to query it quickly on my dashboard so that that is why we wanted to talk about it some some really things that you were unable to do or really difficult to do now become much more practical um when you know to use the query builder first okay um when does the data get written to the pa tables yeah thomas you want to answer that how does it work with pa so um so i'm guessing we're talking about when we use that particular um report source of data source inside of an indicator source and then you create an indicator so so yes i mean the the indicator and the indicator source work exactly the same way that it would if you were going directly to a table or another data source that you had that was that was created so when you run the um the indicator and collect that data it's going to store that the the data that it got from those particular or that particular report uh source or data source directly in the pa scores table like it like it has any other time yeah the the value the you know one of the benefits we get from doing this in query builder is now i it's it is a table that any we i mean not a view it is a table and i can use the date the data from the table anywhere i want to any way i want to um so lots of very powerful things by doing this in two parts rather than trying to do all in one one pass uh and then yes and the ph the pa jobs need to be created so yeah the query builder builds a table and now you need to configure pa right at the end of the day that you need to configure pa um there uh uh there are a couple of interesting things about it as you go through so each query each saved query is a different table so your breakdown mappings might need to have well your breakdown mappings do need to be mapped to each one of those queries so and it's a little bit weird or each one of those tables and the the table name is uh it's got a set id in the table name right a little a little quirky um it absolutely can be done when you need to do it uh it is not the smoothest experience today and that that feedback's already been received uh thomas and i were we're uh looking at it quite clearly so we're putting some of those requirements in to make it better but you can do it today you absolutely can do it today and hopefully in the future it'll just be easier to do easier to maintain so yeah when you i mean when you when you look for whatever you're looking for at the indicator source level and uh and you click preview like you've done on anything else you literally will get back the same amount of results that uh that you saw directly in um the results when you ran it from cmdb query so again it's just it's just telling it where to go and then you have to you know create your indicator add that indicator to a job run your job and everything works the same way after that point okay and uh another question we have in here i think this relates to some of what we've seen before can the itfm module uh so the financial management uh use the query builder and the creation of weighted metrics uh wow i can take this one if you if you like yeah i think i think the answer is no um not for itfm data specifically if you are there's no there's no special magic here all this is doing is it's allowing me to get the query the query data out the cmdb data out into a reportable method so if you just need to know your cmd if you need to analyze your cmdb data and then in context of the financial information then then yes but it's not just a query tool to to build your other situ your other metrics out um that might be a different topic maybe something to put into the community with some questions on what you're trying to do and where you're struggling but i i my guess is that cmdb query builder is not gonna help you with that unless you're specifically trying to get cmdb data out and i'll say that it's not just query builder it's cmdb query builder it's very much anchored in cmdb optimized for cmdb so and that's that's where we focus okay um i think we need to to wrap it up so we can finish finish on time if you have um any more questions um feel free to uh post them once we post this recap you can just post them on that article and we'll see them um oh i'm gonna i'm gonna bring this up again there there was a question about um a number of tables the cmdb query builder tables that are created and it does create tables they are they are on the exempted list so they do not impact your subscriptions for custom tables they they don't impact them um uh volume size is a different issue and data size but the the tables themselves you are exempt they are not counted as custom tables although they are a new cr they they are effectively custom table and that they are created by you um they are not counted by us we do not consider them to be custom tables okay thomas i'm going to take sharing back okay thank you all right so just as we wrap up we really appreciate everybody's time here uh before we meet again in a couple weeks uh it we're gonna post a recap of this with the video the deck um the links i know there are lots of links in this one some of the follow-up follow-up of the questions that we have they'll be posted on the office hours post in the community and you'll see what what's coming up next what's coming up next is what we're talking about in a couple weeks is descripting performance analytics scripts so how can you improve the usability uh get more more abil more more out of what you do in a script and how do you improve the performance of performance analytics jobs by reducing scripts we're reducing your dependency on scripts so we're going to go through a bunch of use cases where we commonly see scripts being applied and give you alternatives on how you can approach it it's not a one-stop solution but we're going to talk about if you see a script like this here's something you can do to not to not use the script and that's going to give you the ability to use it in reports not just in pa to use it in predictive intelligence not just in pa use interactive filters on it and get much better performance out of your jobs so stay tuned two weeks we'll be we'll be talking about that and just going through those examples of use cases and how how you can all uh address the same use case without using a performance analytics script and again let us know what you think right so we have an article here for you please tell us what you'd like us to talk about sometimes we're going to tell you what you need to know like the like today but often we just want to hear what you have to say and we'll address it and until next time um again if you have questions you don't have to wait uh for two weeks post them in the community um share your expertise i know i see many of the names on here and i know you know a lot uh so please share your expertise with the rest of us um and if you need some help ask for help there are some some amazing experts out there besides uh besides thomas and myself and david on the call so ask your questions please post a screenshot when you can that really helps you get a much more targeted answer it's really going to help you all the recordings of the office hours before are available go go read those if you missed them we there was one on mobile you can you can hit up mobile uh there's one on report sources although thomas's came up today uh but those are out there catch up you can listen to the recording grab the deck skim over it they're available for you if you have ideas we had a couple really really interesting great ideas come up from you i love to hear them put them in the idea portal that allows them to get that's a direct line into our inbound product managers to see them and again as i'd love to leverage your expertise if you have time look through some of those ideas and say hey that's a great idea i really want to see that too when we when we see the ideas in there you can talk about them you can comment on them and you can upvote them when we see an idea that's got a bunch of people wanting it we have no choice but to to address that however we can so make sure you take you leverage the idea portal again that's that's your direct voice into us and you'll see how things are progressing and particularly on this topic take some training there there's just an amazing amount of free and self-paced training right you can do it at your own pace doesn't cost you anything in now learning now learning.servicenow.com the cmdb is there cmdb is there cmdb query builder is there csdm is there lots of pa um also if as we're expanding take a look at the virtual agent fundamentals predictive intelligence fundamentals some really great great classes a lot of our content is going to be refreshed for paris um in the very near future uh really coming up so make sure you're checking out what's there and and stay tuned for those updates as parents gets released and the k the knowledge20 labs are there as well uh which which will reference so you can just browse those or you'll see the links so thank you very much for your time we appreciate it this recording will be posted uh on under the community on youtube and we look forward to seeing you in another two weeks