Troubleshooting and Debugging - User Access Application

[kristian dimitr]

Troubleshooting and Debugging - an evergreen topic in ServiceNow that could be often a very time consuming and tedious process, jumping from page to page and searching for relevant information from different sources. 

In order to assist and ease this process for one of our clients, we developed a set of tools and approaches that we would like to share with you in a series of articles.

The first tool that we will present is a Troubleshoot User Access Application. It is a tool that aims to enable the ServiceNow administrators to quickly obtain details and information about user access and permissions against a table or specific record.

The Troubleshoot User Access tool is built on the Service Portal in a simple three-step process:

• Choose User - Selecting a user whose access should be verified.

• Choose Target - Selecting target parameters (table and record) that should be verified against the user access. 

• Result - Reviewing the access and permission details separated into different sections:

Content Result - presenting the target content from the user perspective (list or form):

Having this section, the administrators can easily verify what the selected user can see without manually impersonating and navigating to the target table or record. 

Before Query Business Rules - providing valuable information for the before query business rules configured on the target table as their queries could be often unnoticed and hardly found when troubleshooting missing records. 

Details like the rule name, condition, executed or not check, script and applied query are all available on the result step. 

ACLs - a comprehensive view of the ACLs configured on the target table. Including their name, operation, roles, condition, script and evaluated access result for the selected user based on the ACL conditions.

Please let me know if you find this tool useful, and if you would like to know more about it.

Kristian Dimitrov

Bright Consulting

[Marcel H_]

This looks like it would be a very useful tool when troubleshooting. Just had a situation the other day that ended up being a global business rule preventing write access to records, which took quite a while to track down.

[kristian dimitr]

Absolutely. Thank you for the positive feedback. The goal of the application is to make our life easier when debugging. And you pointed out a really good example for this with a global business rule affecting the returned records which could take quite some time to be found using the default methods.