Creating an incident

Service Manager allows you to create an incident via several ways.

You can directly create a new incident in the In the Incident Management module by clicking Incident Management > Create New Incident.

You can also create an incident by escalating an interaction. For example, if a user cannot print to the network printer, the user calls the Service Desk for help. The Service Desk Agent creates a service desk interaction record to capture the service request. If the agent discovers that he or she cannot resolve the issue during the phone call, the agent escalates the interaction into an incident.

The Incident Coordinator reviews the information and verifies that it is assigned to the correct group. An Incident Analyst resolves the issue or escalates it to initiate a change. When the issue is resolved, the Service Desk Agent informs the user that the record is closed. All phases of this incident are tracked, from opening the service desk interaction record, escalating the incident, resolving the incident, and closing the record.

Activities section

The Activities section allows users to enter new updates for a record or to view journal updates and historic activities for a record.

New update

Field Description
New Update Type Specifies or categorizes the activity update (for example, communication with the customer)
Visible to Customer?

Makes the update visible to customers so they can view related interactions via self service

Note This option can be bypassed by setting the Bypass Visibility Option flag to “true” in the activityactions table. When this flag is set to “true,” automatic activities are invisible to customers, whether the Customer Visible option is selected or not. When the flag is set to “false,” all activities are visible to customers if the Customer Visible option is selected.

New Update

Used to enter notes to explain and describe updates made for the record. If Journaling is enabled, the text entered here is displayed in Journal Updates. If Activities are enabled, the text entered in this field is displayed as an activity record for the selected activity type.

Note The System Administrator is responsible for enabling Journaling and Activities.

Journal updates

Journal updates displays text entered in the New Update field together with a timestamp for the update. This field displays information when Journaling is enabled.

Activity type

To filter the list by the type of activity, select an activity type, and then click Filter. Service Manager opens a new record list that displays the records of that activity type.

The activities list displays activities for the current record. The activities are listed in order of occurrence, with the most recent activity displayed first. The following information is displayed for each activity:

  • Date/Time
  • Type
  • Operator
  • Description

Incident Details section

Use the following information as a guide when you add data to an incident.

Field Description
Incident ID The system-generated unique ID for this incident.
Status Displays the status of the incident. These statuses are available out-of-box:

Pending other You need something from an outside source other than customer or vendor.
Work in progress means work is underway to resolve this incident.
Reject means the record is rejected. No resolution at this time.
Resolved There is a resolution, but it has not yet been verified by the customer.
Pending Vendor/Supplier means awaiting action from a vendor/supplier.
Pending customer means awaiting action from the customer who reported the incident.
Closed means the record is resolved.
Open The incident has been opened but it is not currently being worked on.
Accepted You accept responsibility for the record.
Suspended means the record is suspended.
Contact The contact person for this incident.
Location The service recipient's location
Affected Service The service affected by the registered issue. Only services the service recipient has a subscription for can be selected.
Affected CI The configuration item (CI) the incident is registered for. Using Fill shows the CIs that are part the affected service. Other CIs can be entered manually.
CI is operational (no outage) If selected (set to true), indicates the item is currently operational and there is no outage.
Outage Start A date/time stamp for when the service outage started.
Outage End A date/time stamp for when the service outage ended.
Service Contract The contract covering the affected equipment.
SLA Target Date The date and time when the next Service Level Objective (SLO) breach will occur.
Title A short description summarizing the incident.
Description A description of the incident in more detail.
Assignment Group The support group assigned to work on this incident.
Assignee The name of the person assigned to work on this incident. This person is a member of the assigned support group.
Vendor/Supplier The name of the vendor/supplier the incident has been assigned to.
Vendor/Supplier Record This is the number the vendor uses to identify the record.
Category The category is inherited from the interaction. Valid entries are Incident or Complaint in the out-of-box system
Area Depending on the selection of a category, a different list appears describing the area of concern for the incident.
Subarea The third level of categorizing an incident.
Impact The impact the incident has on the business. The impact and urgency are used to calculate the priority.
Urgency The urgency indicates how pressing the incident is for the organization.
Priority The order in which to address this incident in comparison to others.
Closure Code A set of pre-defined codes that describe how the incident has been closed.
Solution A description of the solution used to close the incident.

Note: When you view an existing incident, shaded fields are not available for more input. Incident Management populates these fields from information stored in associated records. You can update the associated record to increase the amount of information in these read-only fields.

Related Records in Incident Management

Service Manager lists all related records for the incident on the Related Records section. All information is read-only, but a user can click a record ID to view the related record. The related records are listed in alphabetic order by the module file name: Change (cm3r), Interaction (incidents), Request (ocmq or request), Incident (probsummary), Problem (rootcause). Within each module the records are sorted by ID in ascending order.

The Related Records section contains the following fields.

Field Description
ID The related record number in the database.
Type Identifies the related record as a Change, Interaction, Request, Incident, Problem.

SLT section

Service Manager populates the information in the SLT section with one or more Service Level Agreement records associated with the asset. If no agreement exists, the section is blank. All the information is read-only.

The Next Expiration field displays the next immediate deadline from all matching SLTs. The SLT section contains the following subsections that list the details of the specific SLTs.

SLT type Description
Process Targets Lists all of the matching SLTs from all of the associated SLAs.
Uptime Targets Lists the percentage of time that all SLTs are available.
Max Duration Targets Lists the acceptable amount of time for an outage for all SLTs.
Upcoming Alerts Lists the alerts for all of the SLTs.

Note: When you view an existing record, shaded fields are not available for more input. Incident Management populates these fields from information stored in associated records. You can update the associated record to increase the amount of information in these read-only fields.

Hover-over forms for incident records

In Incident Management, incident forms for open, update, and close include hover-over forms. A hover-over form opens for a field that supports hover-over forms when a user moves the mouse over the field. The hover-over form only opens when the field contains data. The data displayed on hover-over forms is read only.

The incident record forms (open, update, close) contain the following hover-over fields.

Field Subform fields
Contact Full Name, Telephone, Email
Affected CI Critical CI, Pending Change

 

Related topics

Incident Management overview