ServiceNow: Creating a Global List Report (and Why Sharing Isn't Just a Checkbox)

To create a Global Report of List type in ServiceNow, follow these steps:

1. Enter Report in the filter navigator.
2. Click Reports > View / Run. This opens the Reports screen.
3. Click New to start a report.
4. Populate the following fields.

Report Configuration Fields

• Name: Name for the report.
• Type: Select List.
• Table: Select the table the report pulls from — for example, Hardware (alm_hardware).
• Group By: Leave blank if grouping isn't needed.
• Export details: Keep this checked if you want export options available on the report output.
• Header Footer Template: Default, unless your organization has a custom template configured for exports like PDF.
• Filter and Order: Sets which records from the selected table appear in the report, and in what order.
• Columns: Move the desired fields from Available to Selected. For reference fields — shown with a green plus-sign icon — selecting the field and clicking the + icon expands it, letting you drill into fields on the referenced record rather than just the reference field itself.

Once everything is configured, click Run Report to preview the output in the grid below, then Save to save the report.

Note on the interface: on current versions, this same configuration is often presented through Report Builder, a more visual, drag-and-drop report creation experience rather than the classic field-by-field form described above. The underlying concepts — table, columns, filters, grouping — are the same either way; only the screen layout differs depending on your instance's version and configuration.

Sharing the Report — A Separate Step, and Role-Gated

This is where the original version of this guide fell short, and it's worth being explicit about: making a report "Global" is generally a separate step from building it, done through Sharing rather than a field on the creation form itself.

1. Open the saved report.
2. Click the Sharing icon (or, on some versions, select Sharing from the dropdown next to Save).
3. In the Sharing settings, set Visible to:
4. Me — only you can see it.
5. Groups and Users — visible to specific groups or a custom list of users.
6. Everyone — visible instance-wide, which is what actually makes a report "Global."
7. Click OK.

The part that trips people up: you need one of a specific set of roles for the Sharing option to even appear, let alone work as expected:

• report_group — required for the Groups and Users option to be available at all. Without it, that option simply doesn't show up in the dialog.
• report_global — required to set a report's visibility to Everyone.
• report_admin — full administrative rights over reports generally, regardless of who created them.

If a user only has basic reporting access (report_user) without any of the above, they won't see a Sharing option on the report at all — which is a common source of "why can't I share this report" confusion that has nothing to do with the report configuration itself.

One more practical note: sharing only controls report visibility, not underlying data access. If the people you've shared a report with don't have access to the records it's built on (via ACLs), sharing the report won't bypass that — they'll see the report shell without the data it's supposed to show.

For bulk sharing changes across many existing reports — say, moving 50 reports from role-based sharing to a specific group — this is scriptable directly against the sys_report table, since sharing type and target are stored as fields on the report record itself rather than requiring the UI to be used one report at a time.