How To Connect Tableau And ServiceNow: A Guide

3 min readJul 5, 2023

Organizations have several options available to connect Tableau and ServiceNow. However, at significant data volumes, not all integration methods are appropriate — or function efficiently without degrading ServiceNow’s performance.

Below, Perspectium’s ServiceNow integration experts explain the different approaches for sending ServiceNow data to Tableau and outline their benefits and drawbacks.

Table of Contents

Why Connect ServiceNow and Tableau?

While ServiceNow’s inbuilt analytics capabilities suffice for some organizations, many organizations need to conduct more sophisticated analyses than ServiceNow allows.

For example, conducting analytics with ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box capabilities is limited to ServiceNow data only. This prevents organizations from combining ServiceNow data with other sources for more comprehensive analyitics that reflects the wider organization.

Thus, organizations with advanced analytics and reporting needs often integrate ServiceNow and Tableau to overcome the Now Platform’s inherent analytics limitations. Integrating the platforms provides ServiceNow users with a powerful data visualization and management solution.

With such an integration, organizations can get maximum value from their data, and improve decision making with a more comprehensive understanding of the organization.

By using Tableau to analyze ServiceNow data (or ServiceNow data combined with other sources), organizations can get insight into time-to-resolution, service level agreement compliance, change success rate, customer satisfaction, employee performance and business functions to target for optimization.

Benefits of Integrating ServiceNow and Tableau

Integrating ServiceNow and Tableau benefits organizations in the following key areas:

Service Management Process Optimization

With more detailed and comprehensive insight, organizations can more easily identify areas that require optimization. For example, trends in time-to-resolution could indicate a recurring issue — such as instance performance — that is impacting the organization’s ability to handle new cases.

In this case, the issue could be due to performance degradation in ServiceNow spiking when analytics teams are generating data extensive reports.

With the ability to combine data sources from multiple platforms and visualize the data, trends and insight, such areas of optimization are more quickly and easily identified.

Data accessibility and availability

A ServiceNow-to-Tableau integration can improve the accessibility of data. As Tableau can utilize data from a number of sources, users have a streamlined process for accessing data, reports and analytics.

Providing advanced reporting and analytics capabilities

As Tableau is purpose built for data analytics, visualization and generating reports, users have more options available as to how reports are generated and distributed, and the data that they include.

Improving data democratization and collaboration

A ServiceNow-to-Tableau integration supports efforts to democratize data and improve collaboration across the organization. It allows teams from different departments to more easily exchange information, and even enables self-service access to data and insight, governed by role-based access.

Different Integration Methods for Connecting ServiceNow and Tableau

While organizations can choose any of the following integration methods to connect ServiceNow and Tableau, careful consideration should be made to ensure the chosen method meets the organization’s requirements.

Custom, point-to-point integration

Many organizations handling smaller data volumes rely on custom integrations initially. In DIY, point-to-point integration, in-house developers build and implement the integration via custom coding or APIs or a combination of both.

They might use multiple technologies/coding languages to build the custom integration, complicating it.

Over time, as more tools/applications are added to the organization’s tech stack, maintaining the integration and data flow to the right target sources becomes tedious and expensive.

Needless to say, the organization remains heavily dependent on the team or professionals maintaining the integration — so developer turnover is an inherent threat.

Developers time is also limited due to the amount of time required to carry out integration maintenance and tackling integration related technical debt.

Integration Platforms as-a-Service (iPaaS) integration

As the name suggests, iPaaS providers provide a packaged/pre-built, third-party integration platform to facilitate integrations.

They typically leverage API/web services to facilitate data transfers because these approaches are malleable, “one-size-fits-all” options. However, the “one-size-fits-all” approach can make them rather inefficient and cause performance degradation when dealing with large data volumes. Read more about How To Connect Tableau And ServiceNow: A Guide