My two cents here: I was just pulling my hair out trying to solve this error. It was popping up on an mxd that had been published many times before without any problems. Granted, it was a moderately complex mxd (67 layers.) But it had published and overwritten the service many times when all of the sudden the 001487 error gets in the way.
I tried a number of things, including deleting the service and publishing from scratch but no luck.
Then I remembered that I typically published this from a Win 7 VM with ArcMap 10.4.1 installed.
I was trying from my desktop with 10.2.2 (and yes, the mxd was a 10.2.2. version , having been saved that way.)
That was all it took. First try publishing from ArcMap 10.4.1 and the modifications were up and running and no more Error: 001487
I have no idea if this will correct anyone else's issues but at least be aware of this fix that worked for me. Might save others lots of time. ( I did not try from a 10.3.x box or anything > 10.4.1
What is also somewhat strange is taht I am pretty certain that the previous publication of this mxd was from the 10.2.2 environment. go fig'r
BTW - I have been pulling this error and/or some others very similar to it while trying to publish to some Portal linked servers, etc... I'm going to jump that work into 10.4.1 and see what happens. If I have success, I will report back here
EDIT: yes, the newer version of ArcMap made all the difference.