Without a paid Performance Analytics subscription, your use is limited to 180 days of data collection (five months for monthly indicators) and to specific indicators provided by ServiceNow, and you cannot activate Data snapshots. For unlimited access to all features, purchase a subscription to Performance Analytics.

After you purchase the subscription, you might need to activate the plugin associated with that subscription on production instances.

Performance Analytics subscriptions enable you to use the following functionality beyond what is available with the base system:
If you have purchased Performance Analytics through a Professional or Enterprise offering, you may use it with no restrictions in these situations:
  • On the tables of the associated subscription, including associated ServiceNow store apps
  • With any platform and common apps, such as Knowledge Management, CMDB, or Catalog
  • With any paid-for Partner store apps
Note: The tables of free Partner store apps are considered custom tables and are mapped to ServiceNow subscriptions. Your right to use these tables with Performance Analytics depends on your entitlement to Performance Analytics for the mapped subscription.
If you try to perform these tasks on a production instance that doesn’t have a Performance Analytics subscription, you get a warning that a subscription is required.
Figure 1. Subscription-required warning
Warning that you cannot do what you are trying to do unless you subscribe to Performance Analytics

The Performance Analytics Admin Console also warns you when an instance doesn’t have the full version of Performance Analytics activated.

Performance Analytics admin console showing subscription version not activated

Subscription Management for Performance Analytics

With a subscription to Performance Analytics, your features should be activated automatically.

Starting in Tokyo, Subscription Management applies to Performance Analytics. If you use Subscription Management, you should not need to activate a Performance Analytics plugin manually. The remainder of this page describes the older, manual system of activating a subscription.

This feature is available only on hosted instances. On self-hosted and non-production instances, you still have to activate the appropriate Performance Analytics plugin manually. For more information, see Subscription Management.

Identify your entitlement to Performance Analytics

When you purchase a subscription to a Performance Analytics product line, you are entitled to activate the corresponding plugin on production instances.

As an administrator, view your Performance Analytics subscriptions by navigating to Subscription Management > Subscriptions. From Subscription Management you can find the Performance Analytics plugins which you are entitled to activate. For more information, see Exploring Subscription Management.

Activate the plugin for your Performance Analytics subscription

When you have purchased a Performance Analytics subscription and identified the associated plugin, activate that plugin as follows.

Before you begin

Important: Set up and test Performance Analytics on a non-production instance before you set it up on a production instance.

Role required: admin

Procedure

  1. Navigate to System Applications > All Available Applications > All.
  2. Under Filters, find the Licensing section and select Subscribed.
    Applications filter with subscribed selected
  3. Search for plugins with performance analytics premium in the name.
  4. Find the Performance Analytics premium plugin that matches your entitlement and click Install.
    Only the Performance Analytics premium plugins for which you have a subscription should appear in the filtered list.
    The Activate Plugin dialog opens.
  5. In the Activate Plugin dialog, click Activate.

Result

A progress bar shows you the progress of the plugin activation, after which you have several options of what to view.

What to do next

When the process is complete, consider installing Analytics and Reporting solutions, which include preconfigured dashboards and all necessary underlying components. For more information, see Analytics solutions.

Also consider activating Spotlight. Spotlight helps prioritize records by evaluating them against multiple weighted criteria. For more information, see Ranking records with Spotlight.