ServiceNow · Beginner
ServiceNow Certified System Administrator (CSA) exam objectives
ServiceNow publishes 6 exam domains with official weightings. The weight tells you where your marks come from, so your study time should roughly follow it.
1. Platform Overview and Navigation
7%- Moving around the platform: application navigator, lists, forms and the banner frame
- Personalising and configuring lists and forms, and knowing which of the two you just did
- Filters, breadcrumbs and the condition builder, including saving and sharing a filter
- Where a record actually lives: tables, records and the URL that identifies them
2. Instance Configuration
10%- Update sets: what they capture, what they never capture, and previewing before committing
- Application scope and what changes when you work outside the global scope
- Plugins, and the difference between activating on a sub-production instance and promoting the change
- Cloning down, and the preservers that stop a clone destroying what you need to keep
3. Configuring Applications for Collaboration
20%- Users, groups and roles, and why group membership rather than the user record is usually the answer
- Task tables and the records that extend them, including incident, problem and change
- Assignment rules, inbound actions and notifications
- Knowledge bases, user criteria for reading and contributing, and article workflow
4. Self Service and Automation
20%- Service Catalog items, variables, variable sets and order guides
- Flow Designer: triggers, actions and subflows, and when a flow beats a business rule
- Client scripts and UI policies, and choosing the one that does not need a server call
- Service Portal basics and what a requester actually sees
5. Database Management and Platform Security
30%- Tables, extending a table, and the effect of extension on fields and access
- Access control rules: the order they evaluate in, and how specificity decides the winner
- Roles and elevated privilege, including when security_admin elevation is required
- Business rules by timing, before, after, async and display, and the g_scratchpad handoff
- Reference fields, dot-walking, and dictionary overrides
6. Data Migration and Integration
13%- Import sets end to end: staging table, transform map, field mapping and coalesce
- Transform scripts and the ignore flag for rows that should not land
- CMDB basics, the CI relationship model, and identifying duplicate CIs
- Web services at an administrator level: Table API, REST messages and the MID Server role
Our practice exam spreads its questions across these exact domains at these weightings, so your score in each one tells you precisely where you stand.
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