Monitor empty MRVS rows

[Max_]

Hello community members,

In our production instance we have an issue where sometimes empty rows are created thru a catalog item wit a multi row variable set. Mostly this goes well, just in some situations the rows are empty. We have not yet been able to reproduce, so thinking it could help if we would be notified more quickly on this behavior. Than we can look at logging, contact the user for what they did. Hoping this will help us in understanding and finding steps to reproduce.

Any thoughts on how we can monitor this? We are thinking of a report, a counter on a homepage, a notification, an incident, something like that. How to check if a row is empty created?

(the bottom rows in the image are the empty rows)

Thank you.

[Manish Vinayak1]

Hi Max,

Are the variables in the multi-row variable set mandatory? I mean if they are required to be filled out, I think the variables within the variable set should have been mandatory. 

So, they could submit a request without a MRVS row, but if they are trying to add a row, it is mandatory to fill those variables before adding a new row.

Also, if you want atleast one row to be mandatory, you could apply that to the whole MRVS.

Would you be able to confirm?

Cheers,

Manish

[Max_]

Thank you for your response.
Normally we cannot submit an empty row, because indeed one or more variables are mandatory. So we cannot actually insert an empty row. Removing a row also does not create an empty row or something. So far we couldn't reproduce this, therefor looking into monitoring. If this would occur again, we could immediately contact the user. How did they achieve this, did they notice this bevahior.

Max

[Manish Vinayak1]

Thanks for the explanation Max. It is strange. Well for prevention, I believe you can try having an onsubmit client script just to validate that it was submitted properly. And UI policy that it couldn't be modified on the RITM once it is submitted. For monitoring, a business rule can be used which can trigger a notification if the MRVS had one of those mandatory variables blank.

[amaradiswamy]

Hi,

You can create a report on "sc_multi_row_question_answer" with condition as value is empty and any for a specific question. There is an OOTB functionality which will automatically sends an email if record count in a report exceeds a value. check out below documentation for the same.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-performance-analytics-and-reporting/page/use/performance-a...

I recommend to send notification only initially and if the issue is frequent then you can also create an incident, however in my opinion for these type of activities configuring notification is better instead of creating a repeated ticket for a known issue (but this will definitely depends on the internal process your team is following)