Impersonation not working for certain users - Support and Troubleshooting

Impersonation not working for certain users Description  Impersonation is failing for users who have the impersonator role. Not all users may be affected, however users who recently received the role may see "No matches found" in the user drop-down menu on the impersonation dialog box.

Release or Environment All current releases

Cause This can occur when orphaned records, or records where the user is empty, exist in the User Roles [sys_user_has_role] table. Orphaned records should never exist on the sys_user_has_role table, and they can cause issues if they do.

Resolution To determine if you may be running into this issue, pull up the following list in the affected instance (where "instance_name" is your instance) and see if any records populate:

https://instance_name.service-now.com/sys_user_has_role_list.do?sysparm_query=userISEMPTY

If there are results for this query, export the list to XML and then delete the orphaned records.

NOTE : Please make sure that you check with the customer to make sure this is OK before performing any actions.

Additional Information Impersonation issues can occur for many reasons, this being one of them. If you are still having issues, here are some additional resources that may help your troubleshooting efforts:

KB0713041 - Cannot impersonate a user (redirected to login page)

KB0686244 - When you impersonate a user and then try to re-impersonate your own user account, the Impersonate User popup window shows an error Failed API level ACL Validation

KB0691915 - Unable to select certain users to impersonate and error message "The user you selected could not be impersonated" is displayed