Symptoms
It is sometimes asked if there is a method to filter out values with a null or zero value from a breakdown widget or scorecard as displayed on a Dashboard within Performance Analytics. This issue usually surfaces in the case of Breakdown Widgets which are configured to return some pre-configured number of rows, however a number less than this pre-configured value actually has values, with the remainder still displayed with a value of 0. In many cases the preferred behavior would be to ignore those values and not display them in the Widget, but the default settings in the system do not seem to have the capacity to do this.
While the default setting in the Widget could be modified to show fewer values, this is also not the preferred behavior as it is generally unknown how many rows may actually be returned (up to the maximum configured) that contain non-zero values. The following work-around will show a method to update a system property to help resolve this request.
Work-around
The work-around for this issue consists of modifying the setting for a particular system property (com.snc.pa.breakdown_element_cutoff). Doing so will thus limit the display to only show those values which have a returned value higher than zero. The default value of this property is 50, which instructs the system to display a minimum of 50 breakdown elements when displaying a detailed scorecard or breakdown widget. The value of this property will never force more elements to be displayed, however, than are configured in the specific Widget.
Thus, we can configure the system to not display multiple zero-valued rows by setting this property to a value of 1. This configuration can be performed using these steps:
Log into the instance with an account having admin rights to the instance.
Using the Menu Navigator, browse to the following location: Performance Analytics -> System -> Properties.
In the Performance Analytics Properties page that appears, locate the property with the heading of "Breakdown element cutoff point in visualizations".
Change the configured value for this property to show as 1.
Click the Save button at the top or bottom of the Performance Analytics System Properties page.
Note: An alternate method to set this property would be to modify the value of this property directly from the sys_properties list, updating the Value field of the system property with the name com.snc.pa.breakdown_element_cutoff to be 1.
After completing this change, the list should prevent the zero valued results from appearing in the Scorecard:
Additional Information
There are a few helpful blog posts in the ServiceNow community that also describe this issue and the indicated work-around, including the following:
and
Additional Note: The property could also be set to a value of 0 which would cause no rows to appear in the list if there are no elements that have a value of greater than 0. This is a matter of preference, and would only have an impact if there were no resulting elements to return. With a value set to 1, one row (the first returned from the query) would be returned showing a count of 0, while with the value of the property set to 0, no rows would be returned with an empty (blank) list displayed.