How to Create Custom Reports in Freshservice
What Will This Guide Cover?
Before walking through the setup steps, here is a quick summary of what this article covers:
- Why custom reports matter more than relying on default dashboards alone
- How Freshservice ITSM Software relates to building and organizing custom reports
- How to access the Analytics module and understand its core terminology
- How to create a new report and add widgets that display the right metrics
- How to apply filters, share reports, and refine them over time
- Answers to frequently asked questions about creating custom reports in Freshservice
How Does Freshservice Relate to Building Custom Reports?
Freshservice ITSM Software includes an Analytics module that lets IT teams build custom reports from scratch, combining widgets, filters, and metrics tailored to whatever question they need answered. Because Freshservice already provides curated, pre-configured reports for modules like tickets, software, and onboarding, teams do not need to build every report from a blank canvas; instead, custom reporting lets them extend or replace these defaults with dashboards designed around their own specific priorities.
This matters directly for organizations that outgrow generic, one-size-fits-all dashboards. Freshservice reveals its value here by letting any user create a private report first, refine it over time, and then share it publicly once it proves useful, which supports a natural, low-risk path from a personal reporting experiment to a dashboard the whole team relies on.
Why Do Custom Reports Matter Beyond the Default Dashboards?
Before covering the specific steps, it helps to understand why building custom reports pays off even when curated reports already exist.
What Limitations Do Curated Reports Have?
Curated reports in Freshservice Analytics are pre-configured, out-of-the-box dashboards designed to provide instant insights into several modules, such as ticket overviews or software analysis. However, these defaults reflect general use cases rather than a specific organization’s priorities, so they often miss the particular combination of metrics, filters, or custom fields that matter most to a given team.
This gap becomes especially noticeable once an organization has configured custom fields, service items, or workflows unique to its own operations. A curated report built for a generic service desk simply cannot account for attributes that did not exist when Freshservice designed that default template, which is exactly where building a custom report from scratch becomes necessary rather than optional.
How Do Custom Reports Support Better Decision-Making?
Custom reports let IT leaders track exactly the metrics tied to their own goals, whether that means monitoring a specific service item’s request volume or tracking custom fields unique to their service desk configuration. Because these reports can combine multiple widgets into one dashboard, decision-makers get a complete picture in a single view rather than piecing information together from several disconnected screens.
This consolidated view also saves meaningful time during recurring reviews, such as weekly leadership meetings or monthly service desk retrospectives. Rather than opening several curated reports and manually cross-referencing figures, a well-designed custom report brings every relevant metric into one dashboard that a manager can review in minutes rather than piecing together data from multiple sources each time.
How Do You Access the Analytics Module in Freshservice?
Before creating a report, it helps to understand where the Analytics module lives and the terminology it uses.
Where Do You Find Analytics in Freshservice?
To access Analytics, hover over the Reports icon on the left sidebar and click Analytics. This opens Analytics Home, which displays every report created by you or by other users within your account, giving you a starting point before creating something new.
What Key Terms Should You Know Before Building a Report?
Understanding a few core terms makes the report-building process far easier to follow. The table below summarizes the main concepts used throughout Freshservice Analytics.
| Term | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Analytics Home | The main screen listing all reports created by you or other users |
| Widget | An individual analytic chart, such as a pie chart or bar graph, displaying one specific metric |
| Report | A dashboard that houses multiple widgets together, giving a complete view of a topic |
| Curated Report | A pre-built, out-of-the-box report Freshservice provides for common modules |
| Metric | The specific data point a widget measures, such as ticket volume or asset impact |
Keeping these terms in mind helps clarify that a report is essentially a container, while widgets are the individual visualizations placed inside it.
What Are the Core Steps to Create a Custom Report?
Building a custom report in Freshservice follows a consistent sequence: start a new report, add widgets, configure metrics and filters, then save and share the result.
How Do You Start a New Report?
To begin, go to Reporting, then Analytics, then All Reports, and click the New Report button, typically located at the top right of the screen. By default, any report you create starts as a private report titled “Untitled Report,” which you can rename immediately using the editable name field in the top left navigation bar.
How Do You Add Widgets to Your Report?
Once your new report opens, click Add Widgets to begin adding data visualizations to the canvas. Freshservice offers a few different approaches for adding widgets:
- Build a custom widget from scratch: Drag the desired widget type, such as a bar graph or pie chart, from the Create From Scratch section directly onto the canvas.
- Choose from in-built templates: Select a pre-configured widget template under the Gallery section, then adjust it to match your specific needs.
- Clone an existing report: Duplicate a report you or a colleague already built, then modify the widgets and filters as required rather than starting from nothing.
Choosing between these approaches often comes down to how unique your reporting need is. Gallery templates work well for common metrics that most service desks track, such as ticket resolution time, while building from scratch makes more sense when your organization needs a highly specific combination of filters that no existing template quite matches.
How Do You Configure Metrics and Filters for a Widget?
After placing a widget on the canvas, add the specific metric you want it to display, along with any additional filters relevant to your use case. For example, if you want to report on custom fields tied to a specific service item, first apply the filter “Type is Service Request,” then add “Service Item is [Name of the Service Item],” followed by any additional filters needed to narrow the results further.
Layering filters this way lets a single widget answer a fairly specific question, such as how many requests for a particular software installation service item came in in the past month, broken down by department. Building this level of specificity into a curated, generic report would be difficult, which is exactly why custom widgets matter for organizations with detailed reporting needs.
Can You Use Custom Fields as Filters in Your Reports?
Yes. Data source and lookup fields added as custom fields on forms, such as the Onboarding or Offboarding request forms, become available for generating analytics reports once they exist on the form itself. This means that if your organization tracks specific custom attributes through service item forms, those attributes can appear as filtering or grouping options within your custom reports, not just as static data sitting inside individual tickets.
This capability becomes particularly valuable for organizations running structured processes like employee onboarding, where custom fields might track department, equipment requested, or start date. Surfacing these fields as report filters turns what would otherwise be scattered form data into a dashboard that HR and IT can both reference when planning upcoming onboarding volume.
How Do You Refine and Maintain Custom Reports Over Time?
Creating the initial report is only the starting point. A few ongoing practices keep custom reports useful as business needs evolve.
How Do You Edit an Existing Report?
To make changes to a report you or someone else already built, open the report and click Edit, make the necessary adjustments to widgets or filters, and click Save. This straightforward process encourages iterative improvement, since reports can evolve gradually rather than requiring a perfect design from the very first attempt.
How Do You Share a Report with Your Team?
Since every new report starts as private by default, sharing it with colleagues requires an explicit step once you’re confident the report delivers real value. Making a report public typically involves toggling a sharing setting within the report’s options, which then allows other users in your account to view, and in some cases edit, the dashboard alongside you.
Why Should You Periodically Review Which Reports Are Still Relevant?
As service desk priorities shift, some custom reports lose relevance while new reporting needs emerge. Scheduling a periodic review of existing reports, retiring ones nobody references anymore, and cloning useful reports as a starting point for related new dashboards helps keep the Analytics Home screen organized rather than cluttered with outdated or duplicate reports.
Conclusion
Creating custom reports in Freshservice starts with understanding the basic building blocks: a report acts as a dashboard container, while widgets display individual metrics inside it. From there, building a new report, adding widgets through the Create From Scratch section or the Gallery, and configuring the right filters lets IT teams track exactly the data that matters to their organization rather than relying solely on generic, curated defaults.
Freshservice ITSM Software supports this entire process by keeping report creation approachable for any user, letting reports start private and become shared dashboards once they prove their value. Cloning existing reports as a starting point, surfacing custom fields as filters, and layering multiple conditions onto a single widget all give teams the flexibility to answer fairly specific reporting questions without waiting on a developer or a specialized analytics tool.
Reviewing and refining these reports periodically, rather than treating them as a one-time setup task, ensures that Analytics continues to reflect the metrics your organization actually cares about as priorities change over time. Ultimately, the strongest reporting setups tend to combine a handful of well-maintained custom dashboards with the curated reports Freshservice already provides, rather than relying entirely on one approach or the other.
Frequently Asked Questions
Custom report creation, including the New Report option, is generally available starting from the Pro plan onward, so organizations on lower-tier plans should confirm their specific plan’s Analytics capabilities before building a full custom reporting strategy.
Yes. Freshservice lets you clone existing reports and modify the copy as needed, which saves time compared to building a similar dashboard entirely from scratch and helps maintain consistency across related reports.
Not automatically in every case. Data source or lookup fields need to be added as custom fields on the relevant form, such as an onboarding or service request form, before they become available as filtering or grouping options within Analytics reports.
