Learn about user records and their use within the Now Platform.

User account records

User records establish a relationship between an individual and your ServiceNow instance. User records consist of a user name, a password, and information relating to the individual, such as contact information, location, and job title.

Figure 1. User record
A sample user record.

User records are stored in the Users [sys_user] table.

Related records

User records are associated with records on several other tables to control permissions, preferences, and other features.

Roles
Roles control access to features and capabilities in applications and modules. For more information on roles, see Managing roles.
Note:

When possible, simplify user administration by assigning roles to groups. Create groups that contain all the roles necessary for specific personas, and then assign users to those groups.

Groups
A group is a set of users who share a common purpose. Users assigned to groups are automatically assigned to all roles associated with that group. For more details, see Creating groups and Managing roles.
Delegates
In addition to role and group assignments, users can be assigned as delegates, giving them permission to act with the same permissions as a delegator user. See Delegating roles for more information on delegation.
Skills
Use skill management to associate users with their areas of training and expertise. For more information on skill management, see Skill Management.
Subscriptions
Administrators use subscriptions to control which users have access to purchased subscriptions on their instances. Details on subscription management can be found at Subscription Management.
User preferences
User accounts are also connected with user preferences. Users can save personalized preferences to configure many UI features, as well as preferences regarding the notifications they receive. Details on administering user preferences are found at User preferences.

System and guest users

Some automated processes use the system or guest user to apply and track changes to records. As a result, some records may show that they were last updated by system or guest.

For example, when a user logs in for the first time in a day, some fields on that user's record are updated by the system user, such as Last login and Last login time. If a user has a failed login attempt or is locked out, some fields on that user's record are updated by the guest user, such as Failed Login Attempts or Locked Out.

If a record was last updated by the system or by guest users, identify the fields that were updated by enabling auditing for the table and viewing the audit history set. For more information, see Configuring auditing for a table and Knowing about History sets.