Reporting to a Service Now Instance

From Precision Bridge 8.0 onward, a Service Now instance can be used to store and view the reports generated by Precision Bridge during execution. If your migration involves a Service Now source or target server, it may make sense to do this to enhance the accessibility and readability of report data.

To direct report data to a service now instance requires 3 steps:

1. In your Project, specify the Service Now instance to receive the Report data
2. Create the tables required to store the report data on the Service Now instance
3. In the Execution options for your project, select the option to write reports to the reporting server.

These steps will be described in the sections below.

Specifying the Reporting Server

When you open your project or create a new one, there is a tab on the dialogue to select a reporting server.

On this tab, you can select the server type as 'Service Now' and then enter the url, username and password for the instance. Please see the section Configuring a ServiceNow Server Connection for full details on how to configure and test this connection. Note that the Service Now instance selected does not need to be either the source or target server for the project.

Creating or Importing the Reporting Table Definitions

This step only needs to be done once for the reporting server.

Precision Bridge populates 3 tables with reporting data. There are 2 possible methods for creating these:

1. Import the Precision Bridge Reporting update set.
2. Use Precision Bridge utility to create them.

It is highly recommended to use the update set import method, since along with the raw table definitions, the form layouts, list layouts and Application menu will also be created. If you use the utility, all the tables and fields will be created, allowing Precision Bridge to write to them, but the form and list layouts will be defaults and will likely need manually adjusted for readability.

Importing the Update Set

You will need the Service Now administrator role to perform this action.

• In Service Now, navigate to System Update Sets -> Retrieved Update Sets
• Click the link 'Import Update Set from XML'
• Browse to the update set file. This is installed with the Precision Bridge Client tool. By default, it will be located (in Windows) at:

C:\Program Files\Service Management Integrations\Precision Bridge 8.0\resources\service now\update\PB Reporting Update Set.xml

• Upload this file to create the Retrieved Update Set named Precision Bridge Reporting'
• Use the Preview Update Set button to run the Preview process. If errors are reported, these must be addressed. Please contact Precision Bridge if you are unsure of how to handle them. Following Preview, the status of the record should be 'Previewed'
• Use the 'Commit Update Set' button to commit these objects to your instance
• The tables have been imported. You should now be able to Navigate to Precision Bridge Reporting -> Execution Reports to view the list of executions (empty initially)

Creating the Report Tables via Precision Bridge

The alternative to importing the update set, if you are unable to use the update set to create the tables is to use a Precision Bridge utility to create them. To run this utility:

• Create or open your migration project in Precision Bridge, making sure that the reporting server connection is correctly configured to a service now instance. The tables will be created on this server.
• Select Project ->Generate -> Generate Reporting Tables from the menu.
• You will see a warning recommending that you follow the 'Import update set' method of creating the tables. If you are unable to import the update set, click yes.
• The tables will be created and you will see a confirmation. If the tables already exist, any missing fields will be added.
• It will now be a manual process to configure the forms design and lists for these tables as desired, however, the tables can now be used to receive report data

Configuring Reporting for Project Execution

If you have completed the two steps above, you can now specify that when executed, your project should report to the service now instance defined as the reporting server.

To set this for an execution, select Project->Execute Open Project to bring up the execution options.

On the logging and reports tab, there is a checkbox option to 'write reports to reporting server''. Check this box if you want to write reports to the Service Now instance configured as the reporting server for the project.

Note that:

• You can also continue to write reports to csv files and Precision Bridge Web (if configured) as well as writing them to the reporting server.
• Setting the reporting level to 'All Entries' will likely reduce performance, due to the additional API calls to create each record. It is recommended to report only errors and warnings if perfomance is an important factor in your executions.
• If the reporting tables have not been created on the reporting server, you will get a fatal error during the initialisation (loading) stage of project execution.

 

Related Articles

Migration Reports

Web Reporting Functionality