Creating A Map Report in ServiceNow
With Laurence Tindall
In this article, you’ll learn how to create a map report in ServiceNow. Map reports are excellent to use on dashboards, as they allow you to visualize and pin records geographically on a map view easily. Map reports are commonly used for displaying data, such as incidents by country, assets by country, security breaches by country, and new employees by city and state. The possibilities are truly endless with this type of reporting; whatever your use case is there's most likely a way to visualize your data on a map report.
Location Hierarchy
Map reports also allow you to drill into the map visualization when you're wanting to go deeper into a location's hierarchy. For example, you may be looking at the United States and see a large number of incidents being created in California. With the drill-down functionality, you can drill into the state of California and see which cities the incidents are being created from. This type of functionality is great as it allows you to go from a 10,000-foot view and then right into a detailed view.
Creating a Map Report
In this example, we are going to create a map report for purchase orders by location. This will allow our procurement manager to see all purchase orders across the globe and display which countries they're being placed from. The first thing you'll want to do is open up ServiceNow and in the application navigator type in map sources. Under the administration application, click on the map sources module. You'll now see a list of map source records; map sources are records that are used when generating a map report, which tells the map what record should be loaded and displayed.
To create a new map source click on the new button and a blank map source form will load. In the first field, name, this is the name that describes this map source; in this field, we are going to enter purchase orders by location. In the next field, table, this is the table in which we'll be building our map source data; in this example, we are going to select the proc_po table for purchase order records. Now that we've chosen the purchase order table, we have to select a field in which its values will be used to display on the map report. Here we are going to select the ship-to location field because this is where the purchase order location records are referenced; now click on the save button to save this map source.
Levels of Location Data
Now that the map source record has been saved, you'll notice we have a related list on the form for map sources. This related list displays all of the child locations that are contained in the map source level hierarchy. Instead of creating the map source levels manually, we are going to do this automatically by clicking on the generate map source levels link, located underneath the related links header, and clicking on the ok button in the browser pop-up.
You'll now see an information message; this message confirms that the map source levels were automatically created for the data source. We have three levels of location data available to use. If we go back into the map source record and go down into each level that was created, you can see that we have a three-level hierarchy that goes from country, to state, and then to city. This hierarchy is perfect for the report we're going to build. Now that we've set up the map source and generated the hierarchy, let's go and build the report.
Building the Report
In the application navigator type in reports and click on the create new module located in the reports application. In the first field, report name, we're going to enter purchase orders by location. In the source type field, we're going to leave this as table, since the records we're looking to report on are stored in a table. In the final field, table, we are going to select the proc_po table as this is the table with our purchase order records in it. In this part of the report builder, we want to scroll down and select the map chart type (reference 4:40 in the video).
On the configure screen, we need to configure the map report. In the first field, aggregation, we want to select the aggregation of the data. For this report, we would like a count of purchase orders by location so we are going to keep the count option. From the map this data field, click on the drop-down menu and you should see the purchase orders by location map source that we previously created in this tutorial. For the set map field, we are going to leave it as world, but if you want to focus the map on a specific country or state you could do so by selecting that country or state.
We will now click on the next button. On this screen, you can see that the map report has now been generated and you can see all of the purchase orders around the globe. You'll notice that you can drill into the map to look at purchase orders in their respective country, state, and city. From here, you can save the report, share it with others, and even add it to a new or existing dashboard.
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