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Can Power BI Connect to ServiceNow?

Cody Schneider•

Yes, Power BI can absolutely connect to ServiceNow, and doing so opens up a massive opportunity to visualize, analyze, and gain deep insights from your service management data. While ServiceNow has its own robust reporting capabilities, connecting it to Power BI lets you integrate that data with other business sources, create highly custom visualizations, and share dashboards with a wider audience. This article will walk you through the primary methods for connecting the two, along with best practices to get you started.

Why Connect ServiceNow to Power BI Anyway?

You might be wondering why you’d go through the trouble of connecting ServiceNow to a separate BI tool. After all, ServiceNow has plenty of built-in dashboards. The real value comes from moving beyond isolated data points and seeing the bigger picture.

  • Create a Single Source of Truth: Your IT service management data doesn't exist in a vacuum. By pulling it into Power BI, you can combine it with financial data from your accounting software, HR data about team capacity, or even sales data from your CRM. Want to see how IT incident resolution times impact customer satisfaction scores? Now you can.

  • Advanced Visualizations and Analytics: Power BI offers a far more extensive library of charts, graphs, and custom visuals. You can build interactive dashboards that allow users to drill down from a high-level overview (e.g., total open tickets) to the granular details (e.g., specific tickets assigned to one person) with just a click.

  • Perform Deeper Trend Analysis: Use an enterprise-grade BI tool to spot trends you might miss in standard ServiceNow reports. Analyze incident categories over time, forecast future ticket volumes based on historical data, and identify chronic problems that are secretly draining your team's resources.

  • Accessible Reporting for All Stakeholders: Many stakeholders who need IT performance data (like executives or department heads) don't have or need a full ServiceNow license. Power BI dashboards can be easily and securely shared, giving everyone the visibility they need without having to learn a new platform.

How to Connect ServiceNow to Power BI: The Main Methods

There are a few ways to establish a link between ServiceNow and Power BI, each with its own advantages. We'll start with the most common and user-friendly method and then explore more advanced alternatives.

Method 1: The Official Power BI ServiceNow Connector

The easiest and most direct way to get started is by using the native connector built right into Power BI Desktop. This method leverages ServiceNow's REST API to pull data directly into your reports. It's user-friendly and designed for business users, not just developers.

Here’s how to do it step-by-step:

  1. Open Power BI Desktop: First, fire up your Power BI Desktop application. In the "Home" tab on the ribbon, click on Get Data.

  2. Search for the Connector: In the Get Data window, a search bar will appear. Type "ServiceNow" and select ServiceNow Tables from the list, then click Connect.

  3. Enter Your ServiceNow Instance URL: You'll be prompted to enter your ServiceNow URL. This is typically in the format of https://YourInstanceName.service-now.com. Make sure to enter the correct URL for your company's instance. You can also select the "Import" data connectivity mode, which pulls a snapshot of the data into Power BI, or "DirectQuery," which queries ServiceNow live (more on that later). For most use cases, Import is the best choice for performance.

  4. Authenticate Your Account: Power BI needs permission to access your ServiceNow data. You'll likely see two options: Basic (using your ServiceNow username and password) and OAuth2 (a more secure method that uses organizational credentials). If your company has set up single sign-on (SSO), you'll probably use the Organizational Account option, which prompts an OAuth flow. Sign in with the account that has the proper permissions to read the data tables you need.

  5. Navigate and Select Your Data: Once authenticated, Power BI's Navigator window will appear. This is where you'll see a list of all the ServiceNow tables you have access to, things like Incident [incident], Problem [problem], and User [sys_user]. Select the checkboxes for the tables you want to analyze.

  6. Load or Transform Data: After selecting your tables, you have two options at the bottom of the Navigator:

    • Load: This will pull the selected tables directly into your Power BI data model as-is. It's quick and easy if you know the data is clean.

    • Transform Data: This is almost always the better option. It opens the Power Query Editor, where you can clean and prepare your data before it ever hits your dashboard. You can remove unnecessary columns, filter out irrelevant rows, and set data types - all crucial steps for building an effective report.

Once your data is loaded, you can start building relationships between your tables (e.g., connecting the 'Assigned To' field in the Incident table to the User table) and creating your visualizations.

Method 2: Using the ServiceNow ODBC Driver

For situations that require more direct query capabilities or if you're working within corporate environments that prefer standardized ODBC connections, this method is a solid choice. ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) is a standard API for accessing database management systems.

This process is a bit more involved as it requires installing and configuring a driver first.

  1. Download and install the ServiceNow ODBC driver on your machine. You can typically find this in the ServiceNow documentation or support portal.

  2. Configure a DSN (Data Source Name) through the Windows ODBC Data Sources administrator tool. This is where you'll define the connection details, including your instance URL and authentication credentials.

  3. In Power BI Desktop, go to Get Data and search for ODBC.

  4. Select the DSN you just created from the dropdown menu.

  5. From there, the process is very similar to the native connector: you'll be shown a list of tables to select and import into Power BI.

Method 3: Directly Calling the REST API (Advanced)

This method offers the most flexibility but also requires the most technical know-how. If you need to pull data from a highly specific, custom API endpoint or handle complex pagination logic, you can use Power BI's Web connector to call the ServiceNow Table API directly.

The general steps are:

  1. In Power BI, select Get Data > Web.

  2. Construct the precise URL for the ServiceNow API endpoint you want to hit (e.g., https://instance.service-now.com/api/now/table/incident?sysparm_limit=1000).

  3. Configure the authentication header to pass your credentials securely.

  4. The API will return data in JSON format, which you'll then need to parse and transform into a usable table using the Power Query Editor and its M language.

This approach gives you total control but is best left to users who are comfortable working directly with APIs and Power Query's advanced features.

Best Practices and Pro Tips

Connecting the data is just the first step. To build performance-driven and insightful dashboards, keep these tips in mind:

  • Start Small and Be Specific: ServiceNow instances can contain hundreds of tables with thousands of columns. Don't try to pull everything at once. This will slow down your data refresh drastically. Only import the tables and columns you absolutely need for your report. Use the Power Query Editor to remove any extra columns right away.

  • Understand the Key Tables: Familiarize yourself with core ServiceNow tables like incident, problem, change_request, cmdb_ci (for configuration items), and sys_user (for user information). Understanding what these tables represent is essential for building meaningful reports.

  • Date Tables are Your Best Friend: For any time-based analysis (e.g., incidents per month, changes per week), create a dedicated calendar/date table in Power BI and relate it to the date fields in your ServiceNow data (like opened_at or resolved_at). This makes time intelligence functions in DAX much easier to handle.

  • Mind the API Limits and Refresh Schedules: ServiceNow, like any cloud service, has API rate limits to ensure performance for all users. Setting your Power BI dataset to refresh every 15 minutes is a recipe for getting your connection throttled. Schedule your refreshes for a reasonable cadence - often, once or twice a day is more than enough for operational reporting.

  • Learn to Model Your Data: Simply loading a dozen tables into Power BI isn't enough. Build a proper STAR schema in Power BI's Model view. Your "fact" tables (like incidents and problems) should be in the center, related to "dimension" tables (like users, categories, locations) that provide context. This makes for faster reports and more intuitive analysis.

Final Thoughts

Connecting ServiceNow to Power BI transforms your IT data from a static record into a dynamic asset for driving business decisions. Whether you use the simple native connector or a more advanced method, pulling this information into a dedicated analytics tool provides the flexibility needed to build dashboards that truly tell a story about your organization's performance.

Of course, a lot of the process described here - setting up connectors, transforming data, building reports - can feel pretty manual and time-consuming, especially for those who aren’t BI experts. We built Graphed to simplify this entire process. Instead of navigating drivers and data models, you just connect your sources with a few clicks and ask for what you want in plain English. Your dashboards are then created instantly and update in real-time, letting you skip the busywork and get straight to the insights.