My earlier post provides a high level overview of Incident Management in Service Manager .
I also recommend reading on MOF and ITIL procesess.
The best way to learn about Incident Management in Service Manager is going through a real life scenario. I have outlined a scenario here that was requested by a customer and I have demonstrated how we fulfill this scenario in Service Manager in couple blog posts.
The scenario below tries to describe a few configuration and usability questions, mainly with the use of support groups, queues and incident classification categories.
Scenario:
1. Joe analyst is a member of the Tier2 staff that is responsible for resolving incidents in the SQL and Network services the Ops team offers. There are 7 tier 2 analysts divided up handle incidents in each of the services the ops team offers. There are also Tier 1 and 3 analysts responsible for ops team’s services.
2. Joe analyst is associated with the SQL and network Queues. The SQL Queue has all incidents classified as SQL or the child SQL categories. Example: SQL parent classification category, SSRS, DB Management, Data replication are child categories.
3. SERVERXYZ SQL reporting services stop and Sally with the Service Desk (Tier1) creates an incident ticket for the server and needs to route the incident ticket. The incident classification is SQL parent, SSRS as child. The ticket is automatically routed to the correct queue via a workflow.
4. Joe analyst gets an email that a SQL incident 62 is created for SQL/SSRS and is unassigned. Joe analyst opens the console, looks at his SQL unassigned incidents view and assigns the ticket to himself.
In this post we’ll cover:
1. Create Incident Classification categories.. (library->Lists->Incident Classification)
2. Create appropriate support groups
3. Create a template that Sally could use for all SQL incidents
4. Create a queue for all SQL related incidents
In the next post we’ll cover
· Create a notification workflow that notifies Joe whenever an incident is created in the SQL queue.
· Create a view for all “unassigned” incidents in the queue
· Add the user Joe to the “Incident Resolver” role so that he has appropriate access
Now let’s look at detailed steps covered:
1. Create Incident Classification categories
Please follow these steps to create the SQL Classification categories
a. Click on the Library workspace
b. Navigate to Library->Lists->Incident Classification
c. Click on Properties in the Task Pane
d. Add a new item SQL Issues at the parent node
e. Add the child nodes for the above parent (SSRS, DB Management, Data Replication)
f. See the screenshot below
2. Create appropriate support group if needed
The Support Group (denoted by Incident Tier Queue – I know a nomenclature mismatch – too late to change right now) is just another category that you could use to route the incident appropriately. Please note that this is not an AD group or SM Group, as there is no membership, but it is just a way of categorizing support teams so that you can create queues and route incidents. Another variance of the above could be that you could create a special support group named SQL Server Support rather than just using the generic Tier 2.
In some cases we will leave it alone and we will use the Tiers that are provided out of the box i.e. Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3.
3. Create a template that Tier 1 analyst could use
In this case the template is pretty simple, but let’s create it any way just so that you can understand capability.
a. Click on the Library workspace
b. Navigate to Library->Templates->
c. Click on Create Template
d. Type in the name and description
e. Select Incident class
f. Select a Management Pack
· Note: It is advisable to create all your customizations in your own Management Pack.
· This makes your customization portable.
· You can simply import this management pack in new environment to transport your customization
g. Click OK – This should launch the template form
h. Set the appropriate fields in the template
a. Support Group -> Tier 2
b. Set the Impact / Urgency -> Medium (or as needed)
c. Have also added troubleshooting steps in the Action Log Comments
i. If it is known what services or CIs are affected by this type of issue then you can select the Affected CI.
4. Create a Queue for SQL incidents
The queues in Service Manager can be used for security scoping and reporting purposes.
a. Click the Library workspace
b. Navigate to Library -> Queue
c. Click create queue and walk through the wizard:
1. Select Incident Class
2. Select a Management pack to store your customization
3. Select the criteria for – specify classification category for SQL Issues and all its child categories (as shown in the picture below)
