ServiceNow Integration

[jdsubia]

I am currently trying to create a dynamic connection between ServiceNow and PowerBI. I have tried the ODBC connection by installing the driver from ServiceNow. This connection works, however, when wanting to retrieve all records with the columns I want (see code below), it provides a data truncation error. 

select number, dv_caller_id, priority, dv_state, active, dv_assignment_group, dv_cmdb_ci, month(opened_at) AS Month, opened_at from incident
where dv_assignment_group in ('SAP Finance', 'Logistics', 'Quality Assurance, IT', 'SAP Human Resources',
'Supply & Optimization (S&O)', 'SAP Operations', 'SAP Commercial',
'Business Intelligence', 'Non-SAP Refinery and EHS', 'SAP Development', 'Non-SAP Marketing and Corporate Apps', 'SAP QC Review')
and opened_at BETWEEN DATEADD(DAY, -90, NOW()) AND DATEADD(DAY, -75, NOW())
order by opened_at desc

Has anybody found a way for PowerBI to pull in information from ServiceNow? ODBC works but not all the way. Any solution would be greatly appreciated. Are there other ways besides ODBC to achieve this task?

[antonstorozhuk]

Hello @jdsubia 

I'm Anton from Alpha Serve.

I’d like to propose and alternative solution for you, you might want to try out our app - Power BI Connector for ServiceNow:

• https://store.servicenow.com/sn_appstore_store.do#!/store/application/87a42573879e0110fb5033773cbb35...
• https://www.alphaservesp.com/products/servicenow/power-bi/

We have a handy User and Admin Guides for your convenience, but feel free to reach out support team at support@alpha-serve.com if you need any assistance.

Thank you.

Regards,

Anton

[diegoadum]

HI jdsubia, what we are doing is to transfer the data from ServiceNow into our SQL Server database. We are using a direct link between both databases which is really fast. We need only minutes to get global tables into our SQL DB. I can find out more details about the connection if you need it.

Regards,

Diego!

[Sandesh12]

Hi diego,

I would like to know how have you created a direct link between ServiceNow and SQL Server DB to transfer servicenow data in SQL server. We are planning for this approach as we are currently using POWER BI for a legacy application and as we are moving into servicenow we would look to transfer our data into SQL server which is already connected with PowerBI.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

[v-qiuyu-msft]

Hi @jdsubia,

Based on my research, the method to retrieve data from ServiceNow is using ODBC driver currently. In addition, you can vote on this idea ServiceNow.

In your scenario, please verify the code can return data successfully on ServiceNow side. When you use ODBC data source to get data in Power BI Desktop, please enable the trace log to find the cause.

If you have any question, please feel free to ask.

Best Regards,
Qiuyun Yu

[lcullom]

So, the ServiceNow ODBC driver has limitations for sure, but it is using the REST API, so it is secure and read-only, so we have built something very robust around it using the capabilities of the Microsoft BI stack.  The performance issues, query size limitations, timeouts and some of the other issues are handled entirely by our solution.

We have a fully built out solution that includes all of the ETL, Data Warehouse and SSAS Cubes for all modules within ServiceNow.  It's priced for organizations that have > 150 IT employees and is a replacement (and much more) than ServiceNow Performance Analytics.  We are approaching 100 customers with our suite of Microsoft-based BI applications, inluding some of delighted ServiceNow customers like Cox Enterprises and DTCC.  Have a look for yourself and see the capabilities on our YouTube channel and website:

- northcraftanalytics.com

- https://www.youtube.com/user/northcraftanalytics - It's probably fair to say that this is the most popular channel in the world on IT Analytics, but that could be a bit of a stretch!