Creating a new role
In ServiceNow, roles are used to limit and control access to features in applications and modules. Once access to an application or module has been restricted by a role, any user group or user assigned to the role are granted access.
We can create a new role in the Roles modules under the User Administration application. The Roles modules will list all roles currently defined in the instance. Roles are stored in a system table named sys_user_role:
- Click on the New button to bring up the New Record form and enter a name for your new role. In our case, we will set the new role as servers and click on the Submit button.
- We will leave the Elevated privilege checkbox unchecked, which will be covered later in the book. The New Record form of the Roles tables is shown in the following screenshot:
Roles can contain other roles and thus any access granted to a role is granted to any role that contains it. For example, the knowledge_admin role contains the role knowledge, as shown in the following screenshot. Thus, any application or modules that has a requirement of role knowledge will also be accessible by groups and users assigned to the knowledge_admin role:
Once we have created a new role, we will assign it to a group. But first we will assign a user to a group.