Incident Process in Service-now
What is Incident?
Incident is an event of interruption or disruption or degradation in service operation. An open incident implies that the customer is impacted.
Goal of incident management
The first goal of the incident management process is to restore a normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the impact on
business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained. ‘Normal service operation’
is defined here as service peration within Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Different ways to raise Incident:
- User can open Incident Ticket via User Interface (Self Service) or Email.
- IT ServiceDesk will open an Incident for all incidents reported via phone, walk-in or Email.
- Incident Tickets can be opened automatically by monitoring tool.
- The monitoring team will also create incident for qualified alert.
1.Creating Incident via User Interface (Self Service):
In Service Now personal development instance in left navigator search for Incident.
Go to Self Service> Incident> New
Click New it will open Incident Form here in short description end user should write issue faced and define Urgency and Submit form.
2.Creating Incident via Email:
If user don’t have access to the service now or user unable to login to the system in that case incident can be raised by sending mail to ServiceNow,
only if the user is specific or having specific mail id. As per the mail, record get inserted in incident table, for this customization is needed that will
be done in Service Now, System Policy> Email> Inbound Actions.
3.Creating Incident using Service Catalog:
In ServiceNow personal development instance in left navigation search for catalog
Self Service> Service Catalog> Can We Help You?> Create Incident
Enter the issue in Please describe your issue and define Urgency.
Click on submit and see incident created as below
4.Creating Incident using Service Portal:
In Service Portal Home click on Get Help> Create Incident> Submit
Fill urgency and issue click Submit
Incident created as below
All incidents are shown in service portals homepage in My Open Incidents
5.User can create incident by contacting to IT Service Desk via Phone or walk-in and as per information given by user/customer/caller/requester
IT Service Desk will create incident in ServiceNow, Incident> Create New.
Once the incident is logged in into the system now IT service desk agent will work on it. For that in left navigation search for incidents go to Incidents>
open-unassigned
It will check the incidents are not assigned, now open the incident from list as per the short description categorization of incident is takes place then
as per urgency defined by caller incidents priority is set. Then as per the category and priority of incident, incidents are assigned to Assignment group
or to a particular member in that group I.e. Assigned to
Now the assignee will work on that incident to fix the issue/interruption.
Example:
Incident is raised by end user via self- service contact type now see incident life cycle to fix issue as follows
Saanvi is end user she faced an issue that she unable to open email so she has created incident via self-service as follows (for this I impersonate
user as Saanvi )
What is impersonation?
Administrators can impersonate other authenticated users for testing purposes and view impersonation logs. The impersonation option is not visible
in the mobile view of the platform.
When impersonating another user, the administrator has access to exactly what that user can access in the system, including the same menus
and modules. The instance records anything the administrator does while impersonating another user as having been done by that user.
Procedure to Impersonate user:
- In the banner frame, click your user name to open the user menu.
- Select Impersonate User.
The Impersonate User dialog box appears.
- Select a user from the Recent Impersonationslist or enter a different user’s name in the user selection field.
- To return to your original login, follow these same steps then select End Impersonation.
Here I impersonate user as Saanvi
Saanvi has created incident via self-service as follows
Now I Priyanka system administrator checked un assigned incidents for that go to Incidents> open-unassigned
To check the incident raised by Saanvi, I will add filter condition in list view as follows
Click on filter icon add condition caller is Saanvi then click Run
Or in search field find caller Saanvi
Then press Enter it will shows incidents where caller is Saanvi/ incidents raised by Saanvi
Open the incident now I will work on that incident to resolve it.
As per short description I set category and subcategory of incident.
According to urgency and impact incidents Priority is set.
In contact type I entered self servicecause incident is raised via Self service.
I entered Assignment group and Assigned to values as below.
Once incident is assigned State of incident changes to In Progress.
Now assignee will work on that incident and if needs more information from caller or any other reason he can keep this On Hold.
For this click On Hold now on hold reason is mandatory save the form it shows Resume UI Action, once information is taken from caller assignee
will resume work by clicking on Resume.
Click on Resume state of incident changes from On Hold to In Progress
Now after solving issue assignee will click on Resolve and state changes to resolved.
After this assignee click on Close Incident to close the incident and state changes to closed
In this way incident get resolved and then closed. The process flow will be like
In this example On Hold, Resume, Resolve and Close Incident UI Actions/buttons are custom UI Actions.
UI Actions:
Here following are the custom UI Actions that I have created and as per UI Action incident state changes as follows
Incident Process in Service-Now
We have incident where we have following process.
We have following state for incident.
1.New
2.In Progress
3.Pending Customer
4.Pending Information
5.Customer Update
5.Resolved
6.Closed
Incident Process till Close1.New created incident in New State
2.Fulfiller should ACK the ticket by clicking on ACK ui action and incident should go in “In Progress” state.
3.Fullfiller can change the state to Pending customer to get information from user i.e. caller.
4.When user i.e. caller send the information then incident state should changed to “Customer update”
5.Fullfiller then change the state to In Progress.
6.After resolving ticket fullfiller can change the state to Resolved.
7.Fullfiller can cancelled the ticket when it is in In Progess.
8.Fullfiller can Reject the incident before Acknowledgment.
9.Fullfiller will not close the incident, to close the incident we have schedule job which will run daily.
10.Incident Auto Close schedule job will close the incient which are in state=resolved the update date is less than 5 days of current date.
Note:
User can Cancelled the ticket by changing the state=Closed and closed code=Cancelled
User can Reject the ticket by changing the state=Closed and closed code=Reject
Close Code and Close Notes:
When Incident changed the state to Resolved or Closed , Close Code and Closed Notes are mandatory fields.
Close Code is choice field
Close notes is String field.
Close Code and Close Notes fields having more specific details about “Why we are closing the Incident.”
SLA:
Responce SLA start when incident is created and stops when Incident Acknowledged (If ACK_Time and ACK_By field has value then incident is acknowledged)
Resolution SLA start when the incident is in “In Progress” and stops when incident is Closed and pause when incident is in one of the state i.e.
Pending Customer, pending information, customer update and resolved.
Incident Priority:
Priority field is always readonly and it is depends on urgency and sevirity fields using datalooup
We have one client script i.e. if the caller is VIP, then the priority should be P1 using client script.
Incident Assignment Rules
We have assignment rules for setting assignment group as per Incident Category and Incident Subcategory