This project is currently in the proof of concept phase and can therefore be considered pre-alpha. The motivation for this effort is to address the dismal offering respresented by ServiceNow's native reporting capabilites. The non-interactive dashboard concept is intended for large 1080p call center displays and is anticipated to be one part of a comprehensive suite of support center performance monitoring tools.
To maximize the possiblity of long-term success, the first priority before beginning any development was to ensure the development environment is easily replicated to encourage and facilitate group collaboration efforts. Thanks to Vagrant, VirtualBox, git, and Github, this requirement has been met, and anyone wishing to begin making contributions to this effort should be able to get up and running in short order and with relative ease.
Before going any further, the reader is cautioned not to look directly at the inherent "hackiness" of the project's current state; bear in mind this is a proof of concept at the moment. With that said, this section represents the source of a significant constraint on the provability of this concept because the project owner does not currently have access to their employer's ServiceNow table API, which means automating the data flow from ServiceNow is currently limited to scheduled emails with CSV file attachments.
For part of this and most of the following section, this project is indebted to Daniel Beauchamp's development of the Sinatra based dashboard framework known as Dashing, and the team of contributors that have since taken up the responsibility of maintaining this Ruby gem under the Smashing github repository after Daniel discontinued active maintenance in April 2016. With acknowledgements out of the way, data transformation in this context is simply the calculation and preparation of the desired metrics using the raw source data from ServiceNow as input. The output of this transformation is then "shipped" to the data visualization piece. The transformation code itself is an original work that leverages the rufus-scheduler that Daniel integrated in the Dashing framework in order to automate the preparation and transmission of metrics to individual dashboard widgets. In the future this project will eliminate the need for the automated data transport/forwarding section above when the project owner gains access to the ServiceNow table API and is able to fetch new data directly from the source within Dashing's rufus-scheduler jobs.
This part of the project, as previously mentioned, is possible thanks to the efforts of Daniel Beauchamp and his Dashing Ruby gem. The stock widgets that ship with Dashing/Smashing are great for many situations, but for support center performance monitoring, a more full featured visualization library is needed. To satisfy this need, widgets based on the popular Chart.js JavaScript library are included courtesy of Jorge Morgado.