Reporting incidents
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Summary of Reporting incidents
Service desk and IT managers can use ServiceNow dashboards and reports to monitor and track incident status and service levels effectively. The Incident > Overview dashboard provides an interactive, configurable snapshot of open incidents, highlighting critical metrics such as critical, unassigned, and overdue incidents. It also groups incidents by priority, state, and other factors for quick insights.
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Incident Reporting Capabilities
ServiceNow offers various base system incident reports that can be modified or expanded to suit organizational needs. These reports include:
- Basic charts: Bar or pie charts showing incidents by assignment group, location, priority, or state, aiding in resource allocation analysis.
- Time series reports: Such as Incident Trend by Configuration Item, which helps identify recurring problems by analyzing closed incidents over time.
- Multidimensional reports: For example, Incidents by Priority and State older than 30 Days, useful to detect service gaps like unresolved low-priority incidents lingering in the New state.
Incident Metrics and Process Improvement
By activating the Metric Definition plugin (com.glide.metrics), customers can define and monitor key metrics to evaluate IT service management effectiveness. This data supports creating dashboards, automated reports, and refining operational rules like assignment, SLAs, and inactivity monitors to better suit the service desk environment. Encouraging users to consult the knowledge base with related search results on the Incident form helps reduce unnecessary incidents.
Performance Analytics for Incident Management
ServiceNow provides Complimentary Performance Analytics for Incident Management by default, offering an Incident Management dashboard with 15 key indicators for assessing organizational performance. Customers with a Performance Analytics subscription gain access to additional preconfigured dashboards and in-form analytics, which embed performance insights directly into Incident records for contextual decision-making.
Legacy Platform Analytics Solutions
Legacy Platform Analytics Solutions include preconfigured dashboards with actionable visualizations that help improve incident management processes and practices, including Incident SLA Management.
Service desk and other IT managers can use dashboards and reports to monitor and track incident status and service levels.
Incident Overview
The dashboard provides a quick glance at the current state of open incidents. At the top, single score widgets enumerate the open incident statuses, such as critical incidents, unassigned incidents, and overdue incidents. Charts in the dashboard group incidents by factors such as priority and state. The incident overview is fully interactive and configurable.
Incident reports
Various incident reports are available in the base system, and you can modify the existing reports or create new ones. Navigate to and enter incident in the search box to view all incident reports. Base system reports include the following:
- Basic bar or pie chart reports, such as incidents by assignment group, location, priority, or state. These reports help you analyze a specific data point, for example, whether enough staff is allocated to an assignment group.
- Time series reports, such as Incident Trend by Configuration Item. This report lets you analyze closed incidents by configuration item (CI) to identify potential problems.
- Multidimensional reports, such as Incidents by Priority and State older than 30 Days. This report can help you identify gaps in service levels. For example, if a high number of low-priority incidents are still in New state after being open more than 30 days.
Incident metric definition
A metric measures and evaluates the effectiveness of IT service management processes. The service desk can improve the incident management process using information gathered within the platform. You can activate the Metric Definition plugin (com.glide.metrics) and define the metrics to monitor within the system. With these metrics, and the information within the database, it is possible to generate reports that can be added to dashboards or automatically generated and distributed.
Using this information, it is possible to refine automatic rules such as the assignment rules, service level agreements, or inactivity monitors to better suit the unique environment of the service desk. Unnecessary incidents can be avoided by encouraging users to consult the knowledge base before creating an incident. The related search results function in the Incident form assists with this strategy.
Complimentary Performance Analytics for Incident Management
Complimentary Performance Analytics for Incident Management and aggregates data over time, and is enabled by default for Incident Management. Complimentary Performance Analytics for Incident Management provides an Incident Management dashboard with 15 indicators to help you assess organizational performance. For more information, see Performance Analytics for Incident Management.
If you subscribe to Performance Analytics, additional Platform Analytics Solutions are available for Incident Management. The Platform Analytics Solution for Incident Management contains preconfigured dashboards.
A subscription to Performance Analytics also gives you access to In-form analytics. In-form analytics integrate performance insights into Incident records so that users can access important metrics in context and make better decisions. For more information, see Text-To-Display.