DataSync for ServiceNow Troubleshooting and FAQs

Verify if the bulk share scheduled job is actually still running.

First, go to System Scheduler > Scheduled Jobs > Scheduled Jobs and see if there is a job with the name Perspectium Replicator Bulk Share <bulk_share_table_name> (Gold and older versions) or Perspectium DataSync Bulk Share <bulk_share_table_name> where <bulk_share_table_name> is the name of the table as selected when creating the bulk share. 

You can also look at System Diagnostics > Active Transactions (All Nodes) and see if the job with the aforementioned name shows up there. 

If you don't see the job in either place, then more than likely the job was terminated because the platform cleans up jobs that are running too long in order to conserve resources and prevent memory leaks.

You can look in the System Logs > System Log > All and see if there's a log that may indicate why the bulk share job was terminated. 

Another reason the bulk share job may be terminated is because of System Quota Rules.

To prevent a bulk share from killed, split the bulk share into multiple bulk shares of smaller record counts using filter conditions. This way the bulk share won't run so long to cause the transaction to be terminated. For help splitting up your bulk shares into multiple ones contact support@perspectium.com.

One possible solution is to verify that the queue you are trying to send the messages to is valid. 

Go to Perspectium > DataSync > Shared Queues. See if the target queue that the bulk share or dynamic share is using is still active. If it is not active, even though it was previously active, see the Status field. If the message states that the queue has been deactivated due to HTTP POST failing, then the queue has invalid credentials (401 error). Thus, enter the right credentials in the Queue user field and Queue user password field. Click Get Queue Status again to check if connection is successful. 

If connection is successful, check Active to start using the queue. 

If connection is still not successful, contact support@perspectium.com. 

If your outbound messages are unable to clear up periodically you may need to reset your data cleaner rules used to delete sent messages. To do this, go to the u_psp_data_cleaner table and click on Reset Data Cleaner Rules.

 WARNING: This will reset the table with the default data cleaner rules. If you have any custom rules or changes, they will be deleted.

For further help, contact support@perspectium.com.

If your records cannot be shared out from ServiceNow to the DataSync Agent successfully, try the following:

1. In ServiceNow, navigate to Perspectium > Tools > Receipts.

2. Check the checkbox next to the Receipt record(s) with a Pending or Error Delivery Status.

3. In the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, click the Resend Message(s) button. This will create a new receipt record in pending status and set the original receipt record to success status. The new resend receipt will remain in the pending status until it gets an acknowledgement from the agent.

4. Refresh the page and check the Delivery Status for your Receipt record(s) again.

There are two different factors that can be at play if you are encountering this situation.

The first is relates to messages being consumed but not acted on. When you create a subscribe configuration you will check the actions that you want to accept (Create, Update, Delete). If a message is pushed to your queue for a table that you do not have a Configuration set or the message is an action that you are not accepting you will still consume the message from the queue but you will not act on it. This can be seen in the Inbound messages tab, where the message will read “Skipped” in the state.

The second is that you are Subscribed to a table and its parent table. For example, you have created a Subscribe for the table Incident and another Subscribe for Task (Incident extends Task). ServiceNow handles this hierarchy like Java hierarchies, i.e. an Incident is also a Task but a Task isn't necessarily an Incident. ServiceNow will also have a copy of the record in both tables, they will have the same fields, sys_id, and everything. Then at some point you set the Incident Subscribe to “inactive” but leave the Task Subscribe as “active”. There are several cases where if someone pushes a Task record update, and that record happens to be an Incident you will consume and act on that message.

To avoid this second matter you could either remove the blanket Subscribe for the parent table or specifically set the parent Subscribe to ignore certain classes within the Filter portion. 

This condition within the Task Subscribe will make it so you will ignore updates to Problem and Incident.

For the cases where two duplicate outbound messages are created, check to make sure there are not two Perspectium Replicate business rules on the table with each rule being in a different domain. The same rule in two domains (especially if one is in global and another in a lesser domain) can cause both rules to run to create Replicator messages when dynamically sharing a record.

If you get the following error:

Exception (TypeError: Cannot convert null to an object. (; line 1)) occured while evaluating'Condition: 
PerspectiumReplicator.isReplicatedTable(current.getTableName(), "share", current.operation().toString())'
in business rule 'Perspectium Replicate' on cmn_location:Test; skipping business rule

This is generally due to recursive Business Rules calls.

If there is a Business Rule which calls current.update(), then the Business Rules will recursively: update itself, trigger the Business Rules, update itself, trigger the business rules, update itself - until ServiceNow's recursive handling will kill it. Since our dynamic share is triggered on the Business Rules it will work for the true correct Business Rule call, but, it will fail on the recursive calls. So you will see errors of the failed run, however, the correct call would correctly replicate the data.

This occurs because on the Business Rule condition, we check for the current.operation().toString() to help validate you have the share configurations correctly set up and we aren't replicating erroneously. Within a normal Business Rule call current.operation() returns the operation as expected (insert/update/delete). On a recursive Business Rule call current.operation() is null resulting in this error.

There are two ways you can narrow down on this problem:

• Type “Debug Business Rule” in the filter navigator and enable the “Debug Business Rule (Details)” to start the ServiceNow trace of Business Rules and repeat the test to trigger these errors (edit and save a record). You may need to be in the form view of the record instead of the list view. Then copy and paste the Business Rule trace at the bottom of the form and send it to support@perspectium.com. This will help confirm that this is the case and narrow down on the rule.

• Review Business Rules on the table to be shared for any current.insert() or current.update() being called as those will be the ones that would cause the recursive issue.

Sometimes after installing the newest Perspectium update set, the ServiceNow instance may still be using the old version of the included Perspectium scripts. To fix this you can add “/cache.do” to the end of your Instance URL like so:

You should be taken to a page that looks like this:

This will clear the instance cache so that it will use the newest versions of the included scripts. Then just use the back-arrow in your browser to return to your instance.

Sometimes, the Perspectium scheduled job running in the background (such as the bulk share job to bulk share records) will get stuck running. In these cases, you will want to kill the job so it doesn't affect your instance's performance.

In the below example, we will be killing a bulk share scheduled job against the incident table. Bulk share scheduled jobs will have the name “Perspectium Replicator Bulk Share <table_name>” where <table_name> is the name of the table in the bulk share configuration. Note that the schedule job's name field is only 40 characters max so for a bulk share on the incident table the name will be “Perspectium Replicator Bulk Share incide”.

Packages.com.glide.sys.WorkerThreadManager.get().shutdown();
Packages.com.glide.util.GlidePropertiesDB.set("glide.worker.startup", "com.glide.schedule.GlideScheduler");
Packages.com.glide.sys.WorkerThreadManager.get().init();

When requesting a clone of a ServiceNow instance, you will need to select the “Exclude audit and log data” option to not clone Perspectium tables and their data:

Though the Perspectium tables are listed in Exclude Tables list, per the Exclude audit and log data option's description, this option also needs to be selected for this list to be honored.

If you are seeing this error in your Perspectium Logs the issue is caused by improper naming of the endpoint url of the shared queue that you are using for bulk or dynamic shares. To verify this is the case and resolve the issue you can use these steps:

Once this is done you should see your outbound messages being sent out. If you don not see their state changing from “ready” to “sent” you can manually start the Multioutput Processing job by:

For issues, with subscribe performance in your ServiceNow instance, review the following:

• Check the Slow Query Logs to see if any of the subscribed tables or Perspectium tables are listed and what queries are being run.

• Check if auditing was enabled on the Perspectium inbound table (psp_in_message). This table does not come with auditing enabled by default.

When replicating Knowledge documents, you may find extra characters inserted into your document. This is because of how the data is stored in ServiceNow and serialized into XML.

Since this data is being stored in HTML format, ServiceNow will replace spaces with: &nbsp;. These &nbsp; will not be properly serialized into XML and will result in additional characters in your document.

In addition, ServiceNow will also use <p>&nbsp;</p> instead of <br/> to denote extra blank lines. However, these  

For example, the following document code would be displayed like so:

As you can see, the code was not properly serialized in ServiceNow.

To combat this, HTML field values will have to use base64encode and base64decode - this will allow the value to remain the same throughout.

You can do this by changing the encryption mode to encrypted_multibyte. You can find instructions here.

Note: With this, you do not need to use Before Share or Subscribe scripts to account for these characters.

When the Perspectium Inbound Subscribe job runs, the job is checking for the connection of the subscribed queues. If the connection fails, it could be from bad credentials, causing the subscribed queue to be deactivated. 

If this occurs, go to the subscribe queue that is deactivated and update the necessary fields (Queue user, Queue user password, and Endpoint URL).

Click Get Queue Status to make sure that your credentials are valid.

 NOTE: Starting with Helium 6.1.0, these steps are no longer needed to bulk share scoped app tables.

To bulk/dynamic share tables that are in a scoped application, you will need to alter the table's Application Access. To do so, follow these steps: 

To validate that the records in your previously configured dynamic shares are being shared correctly:

Date/Time fields in ServiceNow are stored in the database in UTC timezone. They are adjusted for the individual user’s local timezone as defined by their profile at runtime in the UI. This allows anyone viewing the data to see date/time values in their local timezone to avoid confusion. When we replicate that data we just replicate it as is in UTC, and write it to the target without doing any kind of timezone offset since there isn’t one in the context of a machine integration. Typically reporting solutions can account for this and adjust based on your end user’s needs.

This is fairly standard across most enterprise applications.

A simple example script to do this here shows converting sys_updated_on and opened_at to US/Eastern timezone during replication.

// Date/Time variables you want to update
var timesToUpdate = ["opened_at", "sys_updated_on"];
var curTimeZone = "America/New_York";
 
// Get the specified timezone
var tz = Packages.java.util.TimeZone.getTimeZone(curTimeZone);
 
// Edit specified variables with the offset
var time;
var timeZoneOffset;
for(var t in timesToUpdate){
	time = new GlideDateTime(current.getValue(timesToUpdate[t]));
	time.setTZ(tz);
	timeZoneOffset = time.getTZOffset();
	time.setNumericValue(time.getNumericValue() + timeZoneOffset);
	current.setValue(timesToUpdate[t], time);
}

You would place this in the Before Share Script section for any shares where you need it, and specify those fields you want to convert.

Bulk shares are monitored periodically every hour to ensure proper functionality and stability. A scheduled task will check each bulk share and calculate the time the bulk share has been running. If the bulk share exceeds the threshold of 12 hours, a log message will be sent to the Perspectium - Logs module. The message will have a “Type” of “error” and a “Name” of “PerspectiumReplicator.BulkShareMonitor” and can be subscribed to using Error Notifications.

Before the Paris release of ServiceNow, Flow Designer's did not include extended records as a triggering option. Thus, to capture any creates or updates from an extended record, i.e. incident from task, additional Flow Designer's are needed. 

So, if you create a dynamic share with task as the Table, you will see additional Flow Designers created for its extended tables such as incident. 

 NOTE: Starting in Paris, ServiceNow Flow Designer's captures changes from the selected table and its extended tables. With Perspectium's Helium release, you will no longer see additional Flow Designer's created for extended records.

See Run on current and extended tables option in Flow trigger types.

For earlier versions:

In order for Knowledge (kb_knowledge) records to replicate properly so that images embedded in the articles also appear on subscribing instances, you must also share the db_image, sys_attachment, and sys_attachment_doc tables. Both the sys_attachment and sys_attachment_doc tables must have a condition based on the sys_attachment's table_name field starting with a value of ZZ_YYdb_image.

Please see the following images for reference on how to set up the conditions for the sys_attachment and sys_attachment_doc tables: