Our ServiceNow plugin gets a power-up

ServiceNow is probably the leading platform in the world for IT service management, and the SquaredUp plugin for ServiceNow is a great tool for simplifying reporting and analytics on IT service performance.

We continually aim to improve our integrations and have now released two major enhancements to improve your experience with the ServiceNow plugin.

Improved Performance

SquaredUp users have reported to us that they have experienced latency issues when loading large datasets on occasions. We have worked hard to address this by optimizing our query performance as well as by introducing paging of query data.

This enhancement does not involve any change to the user interface, but you should now experience much greater speed when loading datasets with over 1,000 records.

Custom data support

We are also pleased to announce that the ServiceNow plugin now includes support for custom tables - one of the most requested features from our users. Custom datasets are a really popular and productive feature in ServiceNow and you can now visualize them in SquaredUp with ease.

In the example below, we have created a custom table in ServiceNow called LoadTests and have defined a number of fields:

• Name
• URL
• MaxUsers
• MinUsers
• TestDate
• AvgDuration

In addition to this, ServiceNow will also include a number of system fields such as Sys ID, Created, and CreatedBy. This is our full table definition:

You will see that, while we have called the table LoadTests, ServiceNow has assigned it the internal name u_loadtests and this is the name we will need to use when we reference the table in our SquaredUp data source.

In SquaredUp, we can now add a new dashboard and select the ServiceNow plugin:

and then select the Custom Table data stream:

Next, we select the name of our table from the dropdown list. As we mentioned earlier, the data source will use the internal ServiceNow name for the table i.e. u_loadtests:

In the parameter configuration step, we can also limit the number of records brought back. This can help maintain query performance when your data has a large number of rows. Once you click on Done, your data will be displayed in a table.

Tidying Up

Looking at the table, we can see that there are some formatting jobs to do with this data. First, we want to hide the system columns such as Sys Tags and Sys Updated By. We also want to get rid of the 'U' prefix that has been placed in front of our custom fields. We can easily do this by clicking on Edit and then flipping the column visibility toggle:

We can then also just click on the names of the remaining columns and edit them in place:

And this is the final result:

Naturally, all of the other great features of SquaredUp such as KPIs, Monitors, Scripts, and Alerts can also be applied to custom tables.

Sharing

Sharing your dashboards with colleagues or stakeholders is simple in SquaredUp, and it's a feature that's also available in the free plan.

1. Click on Share: At the top of your dashboard, click on the Share button.
2. Choose Sharing option: You can invite users to the workspace or share a direct link to the dashboard.

Shared dashboards are read-only, making it easy to disseminate information across your organization.

We aim to continually improve all of our plugins and core features. You can keep up with all the latest updates on our Changelog.

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