Widgets link indicators to visual formats like trend lines, pie charts, and columns, allowing filtering and grouping by breakdown elements and applying time series functions such as 7-day sums. Users with the paadmin or papoweruser roles can create, edit, and add widgets to dashboards, while any user can view widgets once added.

Key Features

• Widget Interaction: Clicking a score in a widget opens the Analytics Hub focused on that indicator, though time series aggregations are only validated in the Analytics Hub and KPI Details, not within widgets.
• Value Rounding: Numeric values are abbreviated for readability (e.g., 11,234 as 11K, 1,200,000 as 1M, and 1,500,000,000 as 1G), with minor rounding errors possible in averages.
• Widget Types and Purposes:
  • Time Series: Displays indicator score changes over time, mostly using line charts but also supporting various other visualizations like columns and areas.
  • Breakdown: Groups scores by breakdown elements with charts like scorecards, pie charts, funnels, and treemaps.
  • Score: Shows aggregated indicator scores and comparisons against targets using scorecards or speedometers.
  • List: Lists metrics for multiple indicators, using scorecards or spider web charts.
  • Pivot: Groups scores of one indicator by two breakdowns, visualized as heatmaps.
  • Text Analytics: Visualizes word frequencies from user-entered text via word clouds.
  • Workbench: Monitors multiple indicators and their relationships to track workflows or processes.
• Security and Access Control: Starting with the Quebec release, widgets adhere to indicator and breakdown access control lists (ACLs). Viewing widgets generally requires no roles beyond ACL compliance, but upgraded instances from earlier releases may still follow older rules, sometimes requiring the paviewer role for list, text, and parts of workbench widgets.
• Accessibility Options: Enabling Accessibility > Enable data table for charts and graphs replaces graphical charts with tables for all Performance Analytics widgets except Workbench widgets, which show both formats. Additional options include replacing colors with patterns to improve accessibility.

Practical Considerations for ServiceNow Customers

• Use Performance Analytics widgets to create tailored visual insights on dashboards, facilitating monitoring and decision-making based on indicator scores.
• Assign paadmin or papoweruser roles to users responsible for creating or managing widgets and dashboards.
• Be aware that some widget types and features have limited support or are in maintenance mode, so plan accordingly, especially if considering Platform Analytics alternatives.
• Configure access controls carefully to comply with security requirements introduced in Quebec and ensure users see only authorized data.
• Leverage accessibility features to ensure widget data is usable by all users, including those requiring table views or non-color cues.