Searching the Help
To search for information in the Help, type a word or phrase in the Search box. When you enter a group of words, OR is inferred. You can use Boolean operators to refine your search.
Results returned are case insensitive. However, results ranking takes case into account and assigns higher scores to case matches. Therefore, a search for "cats" followed by a search for "Cats" would return the same number of Help topics, but the order in which the topics are listed would be different.
Words and Phrases
| Search for | Example | Results |
|---|---|---|
| A single word | cat
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Topics that contain the word "cat". You will also find its grammatical variations, such as "cats". |
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A phrase. You can specify that the search results contain a specific phrase. |
"cat food" (quotation marks) |
Topics that contain the literal phrase "cat food" and all its grammatical variations. Without the quotation marks, the query is equivalent to specifying an OR operator, which finds topics with one of the individual words instead of the phrase. |
Using Boolean Operators
| Search for | Operator | Example |
|---|---|---|
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Two or more words in the same topic |
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| Either word in a topic |
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| Topics that do not contain a specific word or phrase |
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| Topics that contain one string and do not contain another | ^ (caret) |
cat ^ mouse
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| A combination of search types | ( ) parentheses |
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- Incident Management overview
- What is an incident?
- Affected services option for Incidents and Changes
- Submitting an incident
- Alerts and escalation
- Categories
- Posting outages
- Cause codes and probable cause
- Incident Management summary link records
- Incident Management contract management records
- Incident Management and service level agreements
- Incident Management macro list editor
- Incident Management paging feature
- Incident Audit Trail
- Incident Updates: Incident Diagnosis Details
- Alerts and Escalation
- Field-Level Controls
- Incident record data model
- Incident and Service Request separation
- User Satisfaction
Categories
Incident Management enables you to categorize and track types of Incident records, such as software, equipment, facilities, and network, and to track the resolution of Incident records. Incident records, service desk interaction reports, root cause records, and known errors are assigned to a category. A category classifies an incident or report by type.
A category can determine the following information:
- Person or group of people responsible for resolving the service desk interaction or incident (the default Assignment Group)
- Information that is required to open an incident
- Incident severity
- Incident priority
- Allowed time for incident resolution
- Time interval for escalating an Incident record to a higher alert stage
Categories and Incident forms
You can customize Incident forms for each category with different tabs that contain category-specific information. For example, information required to solve a software Incident record is different from information required to solve an equipment Incident record. Some forms may also have a Service Referral group of fields.
When you gather information about an Incident record or a Service Desk interaction, you will add the information to an initial form, select a category, and then click New to add the record. The form associated with the category of the Incident opens. If you assign the wrong category to an Incident record, you can reassign the category of the Incident if you have an appropriate Security Profile.
Service Manager administrators can add and revise Incident categories.
Incident Management categories
Each category record contains fields to define assignment groups for the Category, Open, and Print options and forms that Incident Management associates with the category as well as the triggers for alert levels.
| Category | Use |
|---|---|
| Complaint | Interactions in which the user reports less than satisfactory service or performance. This is a Hybrid mode category, that is created by using your existing Classic mode category when you upgrade to Service Manager Hybrid. |
| Complaint codeless | Interactions in which the user reports less than satisfactory service or performance. |
| Incident | Interactions that are opened specifically to start an incident management process. This is a Hybrid mode category, that is created by using your existing Classic mode category when you upgrade to Service Manager Hybrid. |
| Incident codeless | Interactions that are opened specifically to start an incident management process. |
| Problem Codeless | Interactions that are opened specifically to start the problem management process. |
| Request for Administration | Interactions that are opened specifically to request assistance from a system administrator, such as a password resets or rights to access a specific area. |
| Request for Change | Interactions that are opened specifically to start a change process. This is a Hybrid mode category, that is created by using your existing Classic mode category when you upgrade to Service Manager Hybrid. |
| Request for Information | Call or incidents that request information only. This is a Hybrid mode category, that is created by using your existing Classic mode category when you upgrade to Service Manager Hybrid. |
| Request for Information codeless | Call or incidents that request information only. |
| Service catalog codeless | Interactions that are requests for items from the service catalog. |
Adding a new category subform
When you create a new category, you can add a subform for that category. Incident Management, Service Desk, and Problem Management share the same categories and forms.
When you select the category, Incident Management applies the subform to the Incident record. The fields in the subform appear in the incident form. The subform can appear as a new tab, or replace a subform associated with an existing category as a basis for the new category.
You can be more efficient if you create subforms by using Forms Designer when you customize your Service Manager applications. You must only change the category-specific information because header and update categories remain the same for all categories.
Related topics
Incident Management overview
Incident Management administrator tasks
