Use PDIs? Take our 5-minute survey to help shape the PDI roadmap.

Extend Dynamic Guidance with Your Knowledge Base: A Complete Configuration Guide

Paty Montesinos
ServiceNow Employee
an hour ago

Extend Dynamic Guidance with Your Knowledge Base: A Complete Configuration Guide

Adoption Services Hub

Want to see all of our other articles and blogs related to Dynamic Guidance or Adoption Services?

You can copy the link above and share it!

We Value Your Feedback!

Have any suggestions or topics you'd like to see in the future? Let us know!

Overview

 
 

Family Release: Foundation / Adv / Prime / ZP9+

Release: 
Roles Required: sn_dg.dynamic_guidance_user
 
Dynamic Guidance doesn't have to stop at ServiceNow docs. If your team's answers live in a Knowledge Base, you can plug that in too — no code required. Here's how to wire up your KB as a search source, publish it cleanly, and see it show up in real answers.

Why this matters

Out of the box, Dynamic Guidance indexes ServiceNow product documentation.
But most of what your users actually need to know — internal SOPs, dashboard definitions, org-specific process notes — lives in your Knowledge Base. Once you register that KB as a search source, Otto (the AI Search layer under Dynamic Guidance) automatically queries across it alongside every other registered source. One search box, all your knowledge, zero code changes.

Step 1: Open the Dynamic Guidance Search Profile

  1. From the navigation menu, go to AI Search → AI Search Profiles.
  2. Search for the Dynamic Guidance Search Profile and open its form view.
  3. Scroll to the Search Sources related list at the bottom.
  4. Right-click the list header and choose Link Existing.
This is where you'll attach your Knowledge Base as a new source for Dynamic Guidance to pull from.

Step 2: Point it at your Knowledge Articles

In the new Search Profile – Search Source Mapping record:
  1. Confirm the Profile field is set to your Dynamic Guidance Search Profile.
  2. In the Search source field, select the source that covers All Knowledge Articles (or the specific KB source you want indexed).
  3. Leave the exclusion checkboxes unchecked unless you have a specific reason to exclude that content from regular search or Now Assist Genius Results.
  4. Click Submit.

Step 3: Confirm the source is valid

Before you publish, it's worth double-checking what you just linked:
  1. Open the search source record and click the info icon next to Indexed Source.
  2. Confirm the Conditions — you're looking for something like Active = true AND Workflow = Published AND Valid to > [today's date].
  3. This tells you the source only pulls in knowledge articles that are active, published, and not expired — exactly what you want feeding Dynamic Guidance.

Step 4: Verify the Knowledge Table itself

  1. From the indexed source, open the underlying Knowledge Table.
  2. Check the record count — this confirms the conditions are actually matching real, current articles (not an empty or misconfigured filter).
  3. If the count looks right, you're ready to move on.

Step 5: Publish the profile

Return to the Dynamic Guidance Search Profile and click Publish. If everything's configured correctly, the profile moves out of Draft, and your KB is live as a Dynamic Guidance source.

When publishing won't go through: the orphan dictionary fix

Sometimes you'll hit an error like "You cannot publish this profile yet, because you have unpublished dictionaries linked to this profile." This usually means an orphan dictionary got created somewhere along the way.
 
Here's the fix:
  1. Navigate to the AI Search Search Profile Dictionary Mappings table.
  2. Filter by profile label containing your Dynamic Guidance profile name.
  3. Find the dictionary record causing the block (in one real case, this was a leftover fund/reference dictionary with no valid connection).
  4. Set Marked for Deletion to true, confirm, and delete the record.
  5. Refresh the list to confirm it's gone, then go back and publish again.
Once the profile publishes cleanly, Dynamic Guidance is ready to reference the Knowledge Base whenever a user's question matches its content.

Putting it to work: the Platform Analytics dashboard example

Here's where this becomes genuinely useful. Say your team maintains a Knowledge Base article that documents a Platform Analytics dashboard — what each widget measures, how a KPI is calculated, what "good" looks like for a given metric.
 
Once that KB is indexed as a Dynamic Guidance source (following the steps above), a user working in that dashboard can simply ask Dynamic Guidance a question like:
 
   "What does this widget on my dashboard actually measure?"
 
Because the KB article describing that dashboard is now part of the published search profile, Dynamic Guidance retrieves the relevant content directly from the article and walks the user through the answer in context — no need to leave the dashboard, search the KB manually, or ping a teammate. The KB article becomes a live, queryable part of the guidance experience instead of a static page someone has to know to look for.
 
That's the real payoff of this configuration: your team's documented knowledge — dashboards, SOPs, process notes — stops being something people have to find, and starts being something Dynamic Guidance can just tell them.

Recap

  • Link your Knowledge Base as a search source on the Dynamic Guidance Search Profile.
  • Confirm the indexed source's conditions (active, published, not expired) and verify record counts on the underlying table.
  • Publish — and if you hit an unpublished-dictionary error, clean up the orphan dictionary record first.
  • Once published, any KB article in scope — such as a Platform Analytics dashboard reference doc — becomes something Dynamic Guidance can surface directly in response to a user's question.

Conclusion

Congratulations! 🎉 You've completed this tutorial.

0 Helpfuls
  • 57 Views