Clocks

Clocks are background processes that track the duration of specific conditions in ITSMA Service Management. You can add a clock to track almost any event or condition. By default, Service Management creates clocks only for the following conditions:

• When an incident record changes status (for example, when an incident record changes from Open to Pending status, or from Open to Closed status)
• When an operator edits an incident record and the System Administrator has enabled the Track Operator Times option (for example, when an operator edits an incident record to add details or a solution)

To track additional Service Management conditions, you can manually start or stop a clock using the following tools:

• Format control utility
• Command line
• Macro

Clock example

The following example illustrates how Service Management uses clocks to track the duration of each phase of an incident record. In this example, the clocks total.time and pending.time track the elapsed time that an incident record is open and pending, respectively.

Date and time	Current incident record phase	Status of clock total.time	Status of clock pending.time
July 1 1: 00 p.m.	Open	clock starts Total 00: 00	Clock inactive
July 2 4: 00 p.m.	Pending	Clock stops Total 27: 00	Clock starts Total 00: 00
July 4 2: 00 p.m.	Open	Clock restarts Total 27: 00	Clock stops Total 46: 00
July 4 2: 30 p.m.	Closed	Clock stops Total 27: 30	Clock stopped Total 46: 00