There are a lot of reasons why companies use ServiceNow – its ease of use, the fact that it’s a cloud application, its extensibility and its huge community are just some of the reasons. At the same time, business dashboards are becoming an ever more important tool for companies seeking to make use of the large amounts of data their companies generate.
A business dashboard is an information management tool that is used to track KPIs, metrics, and other key data points relevant to a business, department, or specific process. Through the use of data visualizations, dashboards simplify complex data sets to provide users with at a glance awareness of current performance.
What many ServiceNow users may not know about is that they are not limited to the Now Platform’s default reporting tools. Data can be exported from the ServiceNow cloud for use with third-party dashboard and business intelligence applications such as Tableau, Microsoft PowerBI, Qlik and SAP BusinessObjects BI.
That’s what SnowMirror makes possible. SnowMirror is a smart replication tool for ServiceNow that lets you make copies of your ServiceNow data from the cloud to your own infrastructure, flexibly, reliably and powerfully. Using SnowMirror, companies are able to make a replica of their ServiceNow data, either to on-premises hardware or to a company’s cloud services – SnowMirror is compatible with all leading cloud solutions, including Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, as well as up-and-coming services such as Snowflake.
Once SnowMirror replicates data from your ServiceNow cloud instance, it’s relatively easy to connect your dashboard tool. You can set the extent of replication with several different parameters according to your requirements. The end result is a dataset that’s constantly updated with relevant information from ServiceNow, one which can then feed your dashboard.
As with most decisions made in the IT sector, there’s a debate about whether it’s better to build a custom dashboard in-house, to buy one pre-made or to hire an external developer to make one according to your requirements. An entire ecosystem of third-party dashboard makers provide both custom dashboard creation and pre-built dashboards that run on platforms like Tableau or Microsoft PowerBI.
The good news is that SnowMirror supports all of these solutions and most of the top dashboard platforms, so we have you covered no matter how you decide.
We go into greater detail about making successful data visualisations in this blog post, and in other blog posts we discuss using SnowMirror with cloud services such as Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure. In addition, SnowMirror has a detailed and updated admin guide here.
If you’d like to to talk with us about how SnowMirror can help your business get the most out of ServiceNow, get in touch: pavel.muller@snow-mirror.com.
