Asset performance reports in the Enterprise Asset Workspace

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated April 23, 2026
  • 7 minutes to read
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    Summary of Asset performance reports in the Enterprise Asset Workspace

    Enterprise Asset Workspace provides asset performance reports to help organizations monitor and analyze the operational efficiency of their enterprise assets. These reports focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as asset availability, mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), and total asset task time. Tracking these KPIs enables organizations to reduce unplanned downtime, improve maintenance efficiency, extend asset life, enhance financial planning, and align asset operations with service level agreements (SLAs).

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    Key Features

    • Asset KPIs Tracking: Measures asset availability, MTBF, MTTR, and task time based on work orders, incidents, and outages.
    • Outage Management: Automatically creates outage records during asset state changes or work order/incident creation. Outages are classified as planned or unplanned and managed to avoid double counting when overlapping.
    • Hierarchy Outage Propagation: Outages on required child assets propagate to parent assets, and parent asset outages affect all child assets.
    • KPI Calculations: KPIs are calculated relative to operational schedules and asset states, stored in the Asset availability table, and updated via scheduled jobs.
    • Configurable Tracking: Customers must opt into specific asset model categories and define operational schedules to enable KPI tracking.
    • Reporting Access: KPI reports are available on the contextual sidebar for individual assets and aggregated for all assets in the Asset analytics view under the Asset performance tab.
    • Scheduled Jobs: Weekly scheduled jobs calculate KPIs and generate reports, including historical KPI calculations when needed.

    Considerations and Requirements

    • The First Used field on assets must contain a valid timestamp for accurate tracking; missing or invalid values exclude assets from performance reports.
    • Asset KPIs are not calculated for pallets, consumables, or bundle assets.
    • Operational schedules must be created and linked to assets; otherwise, default schedules apply.
    • KPI tracking begins when an asset transitions to the In use state and stops when it moves to Retired or Missing.

    Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers

    By enabling and configuring asset performance reporting in the Enterprise Asset Workspace, ServiceNow customers can gain actionable insights into asset reliability and maintenance efficiency. This empowers better decision-making around maintenance scheduling, resource allocation, asset replacement planning, and compliance with SLAs. The automated outage tracking and KPI calculations reduce manual effort, improve reporting accuracy, and help identify underperforming assets or problematic locations.

    To implement this, customers should:

    • Ensure asset data quality, especially the First Used field.
    • Opt into relevant model categories for KPI tracking.
    • Define operational schedules and associate them with assets.
    • Monitor the Asset performance tab and contextual reports regularly to track performance trends.
    • Leverage scheduled jobs for up-to-date KPI calculations and consider running historical KPI jobs for existing assets.

    This capability enhances asset lifecycle management by providing reliable, data-driven visibility into asset health and operational efficiency.

    Gain insights into the overall operational efficiency of your organization's enterprise assets by using the asset performance reports available in the Asset analytics view.

    Asset performance involves assessing how effectively and efficiently assets fulfill their intended functions within an organization. The evaluation includes measuring and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs), such as:
    • Asset availability to determine when the asset is operational.
    • Mean time between failures (MTBF) to measure reliability.
    • Mean time to repair (MTTR) to measure repair efficiency.
    • Total asset task time summary to measure the total time worked on the related tasks for an asset and its child assets.

    Benefits of tracking asset performance

    Reduce unplanned downtime
    Monitoring asset health in real-time help prevent and predict issues before they cause downtime.
    Improve maintenance efficiency
    Metrics like MTTR and MTBF help you schedule maintenance more effectively, reducing wasted time, and improving technician efficiency.
    Maximize asset life and return on investment (ROI)
    By detecting early signs of wear and tear and scheduling timely repairs, organizations can make their equipment last longer and delay the need for replacements.
    Enhance financial planning
    Insights into performance help identify models or locations that aren't performing well or have ongoing problems, guiding better investment choices.
    Align operations with service levels
    Tracking availability helps assets meet the required uptime targets set by service level agreements (SLAs), compliance standards, or production schedules.

    Considerations, requirements, and limitations

    • The First Used field on EAM assets must contain a valid timestamp for accurate asset performance tracking. Assets with missing or invalid First Used values are excluded from performance calculations, creating gaps in lifecycle and utilization reporting.
    • Asset key performance indicators (KPIs) aren't calculated for pallets, consumable, and bundle assets.
    • Asset KPIs aren't calculated by default.
    • To track the asset KPIs that include Asset availability, MTBF, and MTTR, you must perform the following configurations:
      1. Opt in to the model categories of the assets for which you want to monitor the KPIs.
        Note:
        If a model category has child categories, selecting the parent category for performance tracking doesn’t automatically include the child categories. You should opt in to the specific child categories you want to track.
      2. Define an operation schedule, which is a collection of schedule entries that specify the operational status and total operational duration for any entity that references the schedule. The schedule entries define calendar hours of operation within a schedule.

        For details, see Create an operational schedule for enterprise assets

        Note:
        If an operational schedule isn't defined, the Default operation schedule is applied.
      3. Create an Asset schedule to associate the assets with an operational schedule.
        Note:
        If an asset isn't associated with an operational schedule, the Default asset schedule will be applied.
    • The calculation of asset KPIs for enterprise assets begins when the asset transitions to the In use state for the first time.
    • KPIs are tracked until the state of the asset changes to Retired or Missing.

    Calculation of asset KPIs

    The KPIs are calculated based on the tasks associated with the asset and the operational schedule of the asset. The KPI values are stored in the Asset availability [sn_ent_asset_availability] table, which extends the Service Availability table.

    Performance tracking for assets that belong to a model category opted in for performance tracking begins when the asset’s state changes to In use for the first time. A record is then created in the Asset Availability table with Asset availability % set to 100. The Asset availability % value decreases when the asset experiences an outage.

    Outage record creation
    An outage record is created in the Outages [cmdb_ci_outage] table when:
    • The state of an asset changes from In use to any of the following:
      • In stock - Pending repair
      • In stock - Pending disposal
      • In stock - Defective
    • A work order task is created
    • An incident is created
    The outage record is closed when:
    • The status of the asset changes back to In use.
    • The work order task is closed.
    • The incident is closed.

    The duration of the outage is calculated when the repair task is closed.

    Classification of outages
    • Planned outage: The task type is Planned maintenance or Calibration.
    • Unplanned outage: The task type is Break-Fix.
    Handling overlapping outages
    Outages can overlap due to multiple events being logged within the same time window. To maintain accurate KPI calculations, overlapping outages are handled with these rules:
    1. Overlaps between unplanned outages:
      • When multiple unplanned outages occur during overlapping time periods, they are not treated as separate outages. Instead, they are merged into a single outage to help prevent downtime from being overstated.
      • The total duration of this combined outage is calculated by merging all overlapping time intervals.
      • A sample outage calculation is here:
        1. Outage A: 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
        2. Outage B: 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM

          Result: The resulting outage window is 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM (a single 3-hour outage).

    2. Overlaps between planned and unplanned outages:
      • When a planned outage overlaps with an unplanned outage, the system prioritizes the unplanned outage. The reason is that unplanned failures have a significant impact on asset reliability and performance, and should be fully accounted for in downtime metrics.
      • The overlapping period is classified as an unplanned outage, while any remaining time is classified as a planned outage.
      • A sample outage calculation is here:
        1. Planned outage: 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM
        2. Unplanned outage: 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
        3. Overlapping period: 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM
        4. Resulting outage window: 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM
          Result:
          • The period from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM is counted as planned outage time.
          • The period from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM is counted as unplanned outage time.
    Passing on outages through the asset hierarchy
    In an asset hierarchy, outage on assets or their child assets are handled as follows:
    • If a child asset with the Required field set to true experiences an outage, its parent asset will also have the outage.
    • If a parent asset has an outage, all its child assets will also have the outage.
    Table 1. Asset KPIs
    Asset KPI Formula
    Asset availability (in %) 
    (Operating hours - Total planned downtime - Total unplanned downtime)/(Operating hours - Total planned downtime)
    Mean time between failures (MTBF) (in hours) 
    (Operating hours - Total planned downtime - Total unplanned downtime)/(Total unplanned outages)
    Mean time to repair (MTTR) (in hours) 
    (Total unplanned downtime)/(Total unplanned outages)
    Definition of the variables used in the KPI calculations is as follows:
    Variable Definition
    Operating hours The duration from when the asset first transitioned to the In use state until the current date and time within the asset schedule.
    Planned downtime The duration from when the asset transitioned from the Work in progress state to the Closed complete state for work order tasks of the work types Planned Maintenance or Calibration, within the asset schedule.
    Unplanned downtime The duration from when the asset transitions from the In use state to any repair state, such as In stock - Pending repair, In stock - Pending disposal, or In stock - Defective, until it returns to the In use state, within the asset schedule.

    If there's no repair state present on the asset through a repair order or other processes, the Work in progress duration of the Breakfix work order task type is used to determine the outage duration. However, if there are overlapping durations between the repair state and the Breakfix work order tasks, the combined duration of both is considered. The asset schedule is also considered when determining the outage duration.
    Total unplanned outages The count of total outage records for an asset excluding planned outages accounting for overlaps. Overlapping and concurrent outages are consolidated as one outage.

    Accessing asset KPI reports

    Scheduled job for calculation of asset KPIs

    • The Calculate asset performance KPIs scheduled weekly job runs every Saturday to calculate the KPIs for the assets that belong to the model categories opted in for performance tracking. These KPIs are then reflected in the Asset availability and related KPIs report, which displays the most recent KPI values.
      Note:
      To track historical KPIs for existing assets in the opted-in model categories, run the Calculate availability for historical data job. This job considers the following tasks associated with an asset to calculate the outages and KPIs:
      • RMA task
      • Work order task
      • Repair task
      • Troubleshoot task
      • Evaluate task
      • Recall task
    • The Asset availability data collection scheduled weekly job runs every Sunday to calculate the average values of the KPIs that includes Average availability, Average MTTR, and Average MTBF. The job then generates the reports in the Asset performance tab of the Asset analytics view.