Profile

The last item on our list of banner-frame elements, is the Profile link. This will show your photo/icon (if you've uploaded one), and your name. As indicated by the small down-facing arrow to the right of your name (or System Administrator), clicking on this will show a little drop-down menu. This menu consists of up to four main components:

• Profile
• Impersonate User
• Elevate Roles
• Logout

The Profile link in the drop-down will take you directly to the Self Service view of your profile. This is generally not what Administrators want, but it's a quick way for users to view their profile information.

Impersonate User is a highly useful tool for administrators and developers, allowing them to view the instance as though they were another user, including that user's security permissions, and viewing the behavior of UI policies and scripts when that user is logged in.

Elevate Roles is an option only available when the High Security plugin is enabled (which may or may not be turned on by default in your organization). Clicking this option opens a dialog that allows you to check a box, and re-initialize your session with a special security role called security_admin (assuming you have this role in your instance). With high security settings enabled, the security_admin role allows you to perform certain actions, such as modifying ACLs (Access Control Lists - security rules), and running background scripts (scripts you can write and execute directly on the server).

Finally, the Logout link does just what you'd expect: logs you out.

If you have difficulty with a session that you can't log out, you can always log out by visiting /logout.do on your instance. For example: http://your-instance.service-now.com/logout.do/.