Incident integration: Knowledge Management

The HPE Service Manager Knowledge Management module allows end users and service-desk personnel to get speedy and accurate answers to their questions directly from any Service Manager application screen. End users can access the Knowledge Management module through the self-service interface to search for potential problem resolutions before contacting the service desk.

Knowledge can come from any Service Manager data source—Incidents, Known Errors and so on—or any external data source. Knowledge can also include Hot News.

However, the Knowledge Management module is more than just the technical components needed to store answers. Because knowledge articles are created via the Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) process, users can be confident in the accuracy and “just-in-time” solution quality of the answers. The KCS process is an industry best practice for knowledge management for which Service Manager has received external certification.

Service Manager Knowledge Management is a fully integrated support-oriented knowledge management solution that supports KCS standards and guidelines. The Knowledge Management module provides a natural language search engine and rich-text authoring tools that enable users to search, update, and author knowledge articles. Knowledge Management integrates with Interaction, Incident, and Problem management modules so that users can search and use knowledge from existing incidents or problems while attempting to resolve a new incident or problem. Users can also use this integration with Interactions, Incidents, and Problems to create new knowledge. The rich-text editor allows users to include various types of images and documents as attachments that can be linked to other documents or included as part of an existing document.

As part of HPE’s Closed Loop Incident Process (CLIP) solution, the integration between Service Manager Knowledge Management module and HPE Operations Orchestration (OO) allows automatic execution of run-books related to change management tasks in the context of Service Manager Knowledge Documents. This allows for better and higher levels of automation.

For example, a Service Desk user diagnoses an Incident (or an end user who does self-help diagnosis) and searches for a Knowledge Management document with matching symptoms to the issue. When the user finds such a document, the user can execute a script from a link on the Knowledge Management page itself. The Knowledge Management link triggers a web service action that tells the OO server to run a specific pre-defined script on a specific server. The OO server then sends appropriate commands to the specified server to execute the runbook commands. When the target server receives the runbook commands, the server executes operating system commands or database commands as pre-defined to accomplish the specified action. This action could be a workaround or a fix, applied to the environment selected by the Service Desk (or end) user.