[Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] hello everybody Welcome to Creator toolbox a show brought to you by the servicenow developer program where we demo all the very much newest and latest and greatest servicenow features for every developer's toolbox we are currently in the middle of our Utah release calendar and so if you would like a full depiction of all the fun stuff that we have coming up and also possibly some stuff that you've missed that you want to review check out devlink.sn Utah before we jump in out into all the latest and greatest for app engine management center and the user experience analytics let's do some introductions uh first of all I'm your host today Lauren McManaman I joined the servicenow community almost six years ago which is crazy and I work as one of our senior developer Advocates on the team I'm going to pass things off next door to our lovely uh guest presenter of the day Brooks Hawkins hi everyone I'm Brooks Hawkins I'm an inbound product manager here at servicenow focused on app governance and citizen development success my products include pipelines and Employments and app engine management center as well as our application intake for app engine uh I have been with service now for about two years I'll hand over to Earl hi everyone My Name is Earl Duque I am a developer advocate here at servicenow I have been on the platform for about six years now uh with service now for about two years and before that I was in higher education doing a lot of development and engineering and team leading uh and I'll give it back to Lauren good well thank you so much for all the introductions I am super super jazzed today because we have a returning to hear them off just yet uh Brooks did a phenomenal presentation last year on app engine management center and we have even more great stuff to look forward to with this Utah release so without further Ado I'm going to kick things over to her to Showcase all the latest and greatest awesome thanks Barn all right so I am here in the new and improved app engine management center I am logged in as our trustee at app engine admin able tutor um of course right how can we leave Abel out of any demo um so one change uh quickly for app engine management center for Utah is it is no longer a workspace so we have aligned the design with other admin experiences so that admins have this familiar experience within aemc um so you'll no longer find it under this workspace tab you'll go to all app engine Administration app engine management center so looking at app engine management center while we're going to focus today on user experience analytics I want to go over some of the features that we do have in this new app engine management center most of it is the same as you'll see in San Diego and Tokyo um so first we have our three different request types but we have also brought some information that typically gets hidden in app engine management center so if a collaboration request gets Auto approved it gets closed out before you even have a chance to know that it was submitted besides the email you get so we're bringing that to the front so you can see if you've had collaboration requests that were Auto approved in the last 72 hours same with deployment requests if for some reason the flow with the deployments fails those are going to close probably before you are able to see them in aemc and while you'll get an email as many admins do they have tons of emails from service now and sometimes it gets buried so we're bringing that to the Forefront so you can address any issues that might come up while you know the deployment request failing is pretty rare definitely don't want that to get buried no so now you're removing excuses of like oh no I didn't see it now there's like there's no way you didn't see it right yeah when the developer calls you is like hey how was my deployment going you're like oh I don't even see your request no no idea what you're talking about you know you'll actually be able to see that it failed for some reason and then we have our new pipelines so one cool thing about what we did in Utah is if you're familiar with the previous versions of pipelines you would click on one of the environments and it would take you to a whole nother page right the new thing is you can do this all in the overview page and everything is within context so you click on show requests and the requests are going to pop down directly under the environment that you just clicked on it's so clean it's okay yeah it's a lot cooler last one where we had multiple pipelines on the top half of the screen and then the whole list that changed on the bottom you can stay in context the whole time if you have multiple pipelines you can either change to the different pipelines directly on the overview page um or you can actually go to the pipeline page and see them on a list like this but again everything stays in context so when you're looking at requests the other pipelines would move down and your list of requests will show up okay so if if people are used to seeing a stacked pipeline like in the previous version then they have a new page for the Pipelines yeah exactly so there is a pipelines page in the San Diego and Tokyo versions um but it would if I had for example if these were my two pipelines in Tokyo and I clicked on test I would actually have to scroll down to under the new pipeline to see that list of requests so it just helps you stay in context to which environment you're looking at which pipeline you're looking at that's great uh and then lastly we are bringing up some of our adoption metrics directly to the overview page so we have our custom apps in production number of custom apps and development and number of developers and then we even break that down by departments these numbers are still going to exist on the custom apps and developer tabs but they're going to be also on the Forefront and then coming in May we're going to be adding par charts for all this so you'll be able to see a trend over 90 days to see you know how your number of apps number of developers is increasing decreasing um and how you're adopting app engine that's the best news I mean back when I was on the SC team that was the biggest question like managers had of like oh we're you know we're paying for app engine we don't really even know its impact so even just that abbreviated graphic of what's to come answers like most the questions that we would get asked exactly right like if you need to report out to leadership you can grab these numbers really quick straight from AMC um requests is very similar to the list in the workspace you're just going to see your three different request types and we're using out of the box list components so you can filter just as you expect to do went over the pipelines tab so then I'm going to jump to custom apps tab um so this was called applications in the previous two versions but it's the same thing just showing you your custom apps the one big difference here is in the previous versions you would have had a left rail here that said apps and production apps and development absent active deployment but what was happening is take your AC bait Corporation emergency alerts app you would have at least two of these maybe three if it was also an active deployment so we have Consolidated it each scope will have an individual record and if that scope has been published to production you will see the published version in the list so these three apps have never been to production these two have been to production at least once and I'm going to come back to the actual custom apps records after I go over developers because that's where we're going to get into user experience analytics yay Developers yes um so if you're expanding any sort of development outside of your core servers now team or you have a huge development team and you want to know who's active um what departments are involved how many developers you have we have the developers tab you can open any of these users and it's going to show you what apps that they have collaboration permissions on and since a little slow this morning there we go I was about to say like Adella hasn't done much yeah she's actually very active right she's a built for app she's an editor on another and then we're also like if there's an active appointment we're going to put that request number directly here so you don't have to go looking in a different place to figure out you know which of these apps are in an active deployment and then similar previous versions we're going to have all the different request types that Adela or any of your developers has submitted so that you can see those in context of what has Adela submitted can you give us a little definition of what a collaboration request means so what does that actually mean on the system yeah so let's say in adela's case what she has I know that Adela was the um develop the owner of the AC bait Corporation emergency alerts app and let's say that she needed some help building that app or she just wanted to you know co-develop with somebody else in app engine Studio or Dev Studio you can add collaborators and give them specific permissions within that app so say um Adela needs help with the UI piece the admin can define a UI descriptor that gives users that have the UI descriptor only access to things like uib workspace Builder catalog Builder things that are UI Focus um and then Adela would be able to request to add someone as a collaborator to her app uh and then that person would only let's say she'd use the UI she requested have them added as a UI developer that person would be able to develop on this app but they would only be able to edit or create anything in that UI space that they had permissions for um reportable version of the delegated development then so if people have used delegate and development in the past it's a little bit reactive right like you give someone access and they go okay well what do I actually need this and also if this were to change probably over time too it would reflect that so say hey At first she only worked on X Y and Z but then you know it changed to something else so that that's pretty cool yeah exactly so yeah you the admin will be able to see um what exactly the descriptor is um and collaboration is built on delegated development so that's the technology that's used um and just give someone specific permissions within an app um but the admin can create any number of descriptors that they want so that they can have a little bit more custom permissions so this is an example of a collaboration request where Adela asked to add Chad as an Editor to one of perhaps I think um this this is kind of good conversation because I think as we're going through aemc um what we probably should have done earlier in the show but didn't really do it uh justice let's talk about like overview why is an EMC such an important thing especially for us developers and admins that are used to Old pipeline methods of managing your cycle of applications going from develop development to whatever pipeline it is a lot of people have the test environment and then production but aemc the best way for me to understand why it's so helpful is because this is like a low code version of devops instead of making everything so manual and tracking and having to have your own systems servicenow is providing aemc so that your devops part of everything can be low code now you can actually track progress of everything from different pipelines multiple pipelines I came from higher ed where uh my last workplace had 20 plus completely separate governed organizations that all work through different methods and the pipelines were all over the place and so it was nice to be able to say this group goes through these pipelines this group post abuse pipelines but tracking that was a nightmare and so aemc that takes away a lot of that headache for admins especially and for devops so that idea of guaranteeing traceability guaranteeing transparency being able to report to people exactly what's happening at a glance that's all helpful through aemc that's all very good to have um just to be able to highlight all that kind of stuff and I think one of the things when you drill down into AMC you could see more even more stuff granular things like uh your your ATF tests um how successful they were all um which ones didn't go through uh people conversing about collaboration people asking for the approval processes for these things to get deployed all those things are within each one and uh um taking a step back from just the updates in Utah like these are all things that are just making a thing that make would make our lives easier even easier and that's one of the cool things I like about AMC hey I'm not with the acronym a e n c a e n c yeah so just a little bit of a there's a lot of cool stuff in here that would make lives so much easier if we just like take the time to you know get it up and running yeah absolutely and app engine management center it runs on your production instance and then we bring all the data to you um so when you're doing deployments we're leveraging the app repo and through our pipelines and approvals that we give to the admin we're moving it through the pipeline without um any of the admins having to actually log into another instance so looking at our pipelines for this knowledge 23 planner were I never had to log into test to actually install knowledge23 on the test instance I just approved it to go from development to test and then we automatically ran ATF and instant scan and then generated another approval so now's the admin I could go review it again and decide if I want to approve it to go from test to production um yeah so and same with like custom apps and developers right like I'm on my production instance but I am looking at data that is from development and production um so we're bringing that data to you so you don't have to go to all these different instances to get a full picture of what's happening or Grant those instances access or Grant people access those instances that probably wouldn't be best Waltzing around and they're all too much you know right yeah exactly yeah and that's the other thing if you wanted to have like an app engine admin that is not necessarily a system admin we have a completely separate role for app engine admins and that allows them to manage all this stuff within aemc uh without having the system admin role better all right so um jumping into custom apps so I'm gonna actually open up my AC bake Corporation emergency alert app and I'm gonna give an overview about this before we start we jump into user experience analytics um we actually release this app usage stuff at the end of Tokyo cycle in November so at the top here you're going to get a current month summary of distinct users how many new records were added and how many records were updated so you can see there were quite a few there's been quite a few activity uh this month already for a particular app you can also see the deployment history and any collaborators on the app in this case Adella is the only developer on this app but had she added anybody else you would see that list of users here and what descriptor they have so then going back to app usage so in Tokyo there is a new platform feature I believe it's called user experience analytics you might also hear it called appsi but user experience analytics is the official name and that is what you would search for on your instance and this collects data on various experiences in the Tokyo time frame we only had workspaces that were supported now we have mobile experiences workspaces portals and that list is growing quickly on what is can be tracked in user experience Analytics um so by open this link and the way we do it I guess one thing I skipped here is an app engine management center is we're going to look at the app figure out which experiences exist in that app and are supported by user experience analytics and we're going to figure out where the dashboard is for that experience and so if there had been multiple workspaces or a portal that we had hooked up for this app you would see a list of all of those experiences here with their own dashboard Which experiences currently show in that list is it all of them or is it like with like a mobile app showcase there or not yet mobile apps are supported um in AMC we started supporting them in Utah so the two things about portals and mobile apps is typically so first with mobile apps you decide which of the servicenow apps you're going to add your app to so sometimes that usage is within like the now mobile app true um but we will if you have added a mobile app to the now mobile app we will give you the link to that dashboard um and then same with portals you can see tons of detail in user experience analytics on Portals but usually portals right contain a lot of stuff like catalog items um and all sorts of you know maybe your knowledge articles other things that you might consider a user experience but they're contained within that portal so that's where that usage will be shown it looks like it's uh looks like and sounds like it's just it's trying to reach parity with app engine Studio basically I see that button up there that says opening app engine studio so I I assume any experience that is being created in AES is probably at uh us going to appear in this dashboard or going to eventually is what I'm guessing right yeah and and since user experience analytics is a platform feature it's even going beyond what is just shown in AES um there's a ton of work across servicenow to hook up different tools to be able to be tracked and user experience analytics so customers will be able to turn that on and it's a platform feature so you don't necessarily have to go through app engine management center to get to these dashboards you can just go to user experience analytics the difference with app engine management center is we're figuring out which dashboards go with which apps and putting it in the context of that app it's connecting everything exactly so this is my user experience analytics dashboard I love seeing graphs right for my AC Bank Corp emergency alerts app and you can see you know I am in a different experience a different tab now and you can see I could actually switch to any sort of different user experience Analytics here but there's tons of information um in user experience Analytics starting with you know the overview page which is going to tell you about active users sessions page views average session duration and then you can actually break all this down by daily weekly monthly users you can look at active versus new so tons of information just on the overview page Brooks is this what we're looking at right now is this fairly out of box or is this um a pre-configured for this demo is 100 out of the box nice um so all I had to do to prepare for this demo was deploy an app to production and then log in as some users and start using the app I didn't have to do anything with user experience analytics the dashboard was automatically generated automatically started tracking this information this is like selfishly this is one of my favorite features uh like of the Utah release because so many times when I was a developer like you'd have someone that would have like like a you know out of nowhere they'd have like a huge interest in in workspaces like add all this stuff to the backlog and all this stuff but this gives you such good data around like whether or not certain improvements or backlog priorities make sense for what your users are using right like mobile might sound really cool but if no one sees in the mobile app you know you got best if you want to use that time in a better way so this gives everyone the best defense of like where things are being created where things are where people are returning to because even shows like user retention like like I said selfishly this is like one of my favorite improvements of Utah I'm so excited yeah absolutely it is and this is just like the tip of the iceberg here with uh all the cool features within user experience analytics there's all this information on sessions you can look into you know how or how are first sessions going versus returning users and loyal users you can analyze you know where people abandoning things quickly short sessions versus long sessions um there's so much information you can pop out you know session details um see exactly how someone is using your the experience um within the user information you can see you know it's all anonymized like we use hash user IDs but you can see like you know how long are the first sessions uh when was the last session what type of device are they using so again like okay this seems like everyone's using Mac and chrome right maybe it doesn't make as much sense to invest in a mobile experience if everyone is using yeah a Mac um for like language like globalization like if everyone's doing it in America versus like if everyone's doing it in Japan that would be like a huge bring up a huge topic of like are we globalizing our applications appropriately and things like that right exactly and in the analytics section you can actually see um Geographic now all my users are in the same location but if that was not the case for your app you would actually be able to see you know how many sessions are you having in each country um and then drill into that so cool map yeah exactly everybody's in Washington um and then you can UI analysis so this is really cool if you want to understand how our users actually using the app um so it's going to take the actual user flows here and it's going to give you the path whoa cool that everyone is using so you can actually figure out you know is there a way to optimize this like okay everybody seems to be going to the status report record is there something that we can do to like make this more prominent in the app um and you can even break it down by newer returning users like do returning users have a once they're familiar with the app is it way more streamlined of what they're using this is this is user experience Centric design yeah yeah exactly um and then even more with the insights you can see like the quit rate um page popularity so you know makes sense everybody goes to the home page and then they go to some sort of list and then they select some sort of record and again it seems like the record for status reports is more popular actually than the emergency alert record um you can see engagement like how much time they're spending on each page you know the times here are low but you would probably expect that from an emergency alert app hopefully people don't need to spend powers of sending emergency alerts and that's like an average of the durations of users right yeah exactly um and then we have pages so you can drill into each page views session um average duration and then if you can you can actually on some of these Pages see the page flow so like it gives you more information on like load time um and you know how are people getting to this page so most people are coming from lists um so and like where are they going from the home page seems like everybody's going from you know a lot of people are going list list you know list homeless that seems to be a pretty uh normal navigation does this um is there plans to track or is there ways to track how people get in from external or get out uh from here to external that is a good question I am not sure that would be something I have to follow up with with the platform team on user experience Analytics designers are just like standing up in their chairs right now seeing this stuff yeah it's pretty awesome um here's another thing you can change the route here um but the you can see the navigation path um and what percentage of people are going where and like what order there's uh yeah tons of stuff and analytics so it's the overview page they said you can do Geographic you can look at technical information so operating system devices browser uh device type one is a big one because I remember that was always such a question of like doing or do we not invest a lot of time in Going Mobile for our custom apps and for some like if it was like an emergency emergency reporting app I think mobile would be perfect however if if it's not and everyone's just using a desktop anyway right like yeah exactly improve yeah and even you know you've it's one of those things like you could give you know the MVP of your mobile app if you think it will be valuable and see if people are using it and then you know people aren't then maybe it's okay let's just focus on making our web applications really useful yeah like adding like also going back to that pathing thing you can see like oh if we just added in like a UI action here it could cut the line on the path that 80 of our users are taking anyway or things like that exactly um and then you have events so you know you can see exactly so viewing data visualization so on there's some data visualizations on the home page so you would expect that pretty much everybody is going to view the data visualizations um especially they're spending a lot of time on the home page compared to the other pages but you can actually see you know tons of details on how what's happening with these events how many occurrences there are what is like the most common thing that users are doing on your app and then there's two cool things that you can configure yourself is if you want to understand how people are using your app or you have intended your users to use your app a specific way is you can create your own funnels so if I wanted to know how many people are using completing the requests and employee status versus sending an emergency alert I've created two funnels for my employee status visit the home page then somehow got to a status report record and then triggered an event versus my send emergency alert which is a very similar funnel except that I am on the emergency alert I'm looking at the emergency alert record no one's triggering events on this emergency alert so is there an issue with my app or have there just not been any emergency alerts that need to go out you know you can see are people using your app the way you intended them to times it so it not only shows like oh they're completing this path but maybe it's taking them shorter than you thought it would or or longer hopefully the former then yeah right um and you can create funnels directly in your user experience analytics um of course live demo instance is always the slowest at this time [Laughter] I think I also liked popular ity is that little icon that indicates that you can download these results because no matter how much everyone on this call loves servicenow some people just don't frequent it that much so the option of being able to download that data so that it could be more shareable always like a really nice touch that I like to see yeah absolutely and like for the overview page right like if you needed to give a report to some your leadership or to um someone in the business or something like that you can download it and share it with them uh without having to you know get them onto the servicenow platform to maybe this will be too much information you just need to give them the high level this is how your app's being used um so yeah there's you can download data pretty much anywhere the other thing that you can create is your own cohort um so this will be like groups of people and how they are actually using certain events um so my first one was for emergency alert action I want to know uh how many people are coming in and creating multiple emergency alerts um like every time they come in that's all they're doing is creating emergency alerts and not actually you know communicating with their asking their employees their status they're just looking emergency alerts and so then I'll as this data progresses over several days and weeks I'll be able to see like what is the percentage of people that actually are you know creating emergency alerts every time they come into my app and you can create any sort of cohort of people to see like what percentage of users are doing things um multiple times every time they return to the app I like that that's very common in web analytics too to see how much people bounce and come back uh because you might get good reception on the first try but then they never come back and this would help inform you uh if they that kind of information helps to inform you if they had a good experience at the versco and if that translates into them coming back or not yeah exactly and you can look at percentage absolute break it down daily weekly monthly and you can download it so I mean user experience Analytics it's awesome um and as you're increasing the amount of custom app development on your platform it's super helpful in deciding like okay should I retire an app where should I spend my time enhancing an app like uh you know can I combine apps with something else like maybe you know you have two apps that have similar use cases and both have a ton of usage like it really helps you understand how are your apps being used are they being used um and the importance of them so nice to see all this it's actually since because I've been developing custom apps since I think Istanbul I think that was my or maybe Helsinki um and app engine at the time was had this stigma of like being the wild west like of service now because at the time there was no scopes there was no delegation there was no IDE and there was definitely no reporting like this and so to see the like platform grow in this way to match the needs of these teams that are utilizing it so much like it brings like so much joy to me because this was like the Last Frontier of that of like really in-depth reporting on the amount of effort people are putting into these apps like is the effort worth it and now thanks to you and your team you can prove all of that that's a huge huge win yeah and awesome like this is the coolest platform feature and I'll say like you know even if you wanted to know how are people using you know app engine Studio you can do that you have a you know you'll be able to see I don't know a dashboard for AES you know or maybe you did decide the system admins won't be app engine admins you're gonna have a whole team that just says app engine admins and you want to understand how they're using aemc you can do that um so this is one of the coolest platform features that has been released recently and that's a good segue into another question that I was reserving to around this time you you were saying that this is great for if you have a lot of custom apps and stuff like that but now you're pointing out that you can do this same thing for app engine Studio does this work for other uh apps that come in that are not custom apps uh we had a question from Robert asking for like employee Center does that can you do those kind of analytics for other uh products and stuff like that yeah so this is the user experience Analytics like home page dashboard um so again it's a platform feature it's just something that we're leveraging in app engine management center uh and just trying to give you a little bit more context for the custom apps but you can go directly to user experience analytics and see the different types of apps that you have here um different experiences so you're going to see out of the box stuff you're going to see employee Center um yeah all sorts of portals your mobile apps you can even go full circle and look at app engine management Center's dashboard right exactly the only thing is I know for portals there is some configuration you have to do to enable it to bring in this information but that is documented in the product docs on like I think there's one or two things you have to turn on so that it starts to pull in the information you would need for user experience analytics I'm sure it's still better than the previous dashboard for service portals where half of the reports don't work unless you reconfigure them yourselves yes but I bet so man is so this seems to have covered especially the difference between this version and even November Tokyo is massive I can't imagine like what might be coming next is there any hints that you are comfortable giving up under the guise of Safe Harbor yes Safe Harbor um you know we're hoping to get some of this out in Vancouver but definitely Washington's going to be a big release because we have some big things coming for app engine management center one thing we are looking to do is bring in subscription management data for app engine um so one bring into pipeline so you can see what roles are in your app and which ones might have a subscription uh implication if you deploy it to production what custom tables are in your apps before you publish it to production and then a whole dashboard on your app engine subscription so understanding how many fulfillers you have stakeholders Uh custom apps requesters all that information and then being able to drill down into those custom apps and see in context of that app how many subscribed users do you have on this custom app how many fulfillers do you have um on a specific custom app which will help you manage those licenses licenses for app engine and then we're working on a big initiative with our Pipelines um where we are going to make them very configurable so we're going to build the pipelines using pad which will break down the flows into smaller pieces and allow customers to move those pieces around um and then want the way pipelines work today is each pipeline has to have a unique development instance but what we're looking at doing is allowing you to associate an app with a pipeline regardless of the dev instance so if you want to have a pipeline that's for citizen developers or a pipeline that's for marketing you can do that but still have them all build on the same development instance and it's going to allow the pad piece is going to allow you to make the pipelines a lot more configurable so think Integrations with change management Dynamic approvers scheduled deployments all these things that are just going to make your pipelines a lot easier to use but also way more customizable and configurable um so they've taken the entire existing process that each customer has that's a lot yeah those are some bigger changes yeah that's as I said we're hoping to get some of it out in Vancouver but it is a huge change that we are working on and some pretty big initiatives so I think Washington uh is more likely the target for these big changes um but it's really gonna help customers deploy apps faster with you know making sure they're following all of their existing processes yeah and then subscription pieces you know that's what everybody's been asking for oh yeah that Union with subscription management would be massive because I know that again that was one of the always the biggest questions of like I have this great idea I have no concept of how that'll impact our licensing so I'm not going to build it so now that'll be like just in plain text on their screen based off of all the development requests they have oh man too cool and then imagine combining that with user experience analytics and seeing like oh someone wants to deploy this new app but I'm low on licenses do I want to buy more or or is there an app that maybe should be retired or doesn't need as many licenses and I can redistribute um giving customers more control over how they're using their app engine licenses great day to be in the app engine huh yeah it's exciting stuff coming well thank you so I can't thank you enough for presenting this this really jazzed me up a great Tuesday Morning spent covering all this really exciting stuff um I wanted to first of all give you the opportunity to plug any type of contact information you have if people have follow-up questions or people that might have missed this recording would like to reach out where can they find you yeah my name is Brooks Hawkins um b-r-o-o-k-s no e in there so you can find me on LinkedIn or you can email me at brooks.hawkins at servicenow.com Earl am I missing anything from my closing notes this is my first time hosting so I apologize for anything I might have missed uh if it's not on the notes then I I think you got everything well I am so grateful for [Music] if it's been recorded again reminder to check out that Utah content calendar at devlin.sn Utah for everything coming up and everything you might have missed and with that all being said thank you all for joining us here today and we'll catch you on the next live stream see ya thanks everyone thank you [Music] foreign [Music]