IT professionals that work on the help desk constantly create and resolve Service Manager incidents as a way of tracking their daily activity. Someone in the accounting department may ring the service desk, reporting an issue that they are having. The IT professional on the service desk instructs the caller to restart their computer, and the issue is resolved. During this process the IT professional creates an incident related to the issue, and if the issue is resolved by the restart, closes the incident. Incident templates allow you to pre-populate certain fields for a specific type of incident.
Incident priority
Service Manager determines incident priority using the settings you configure related to incident impact and incident urgency. You configure incident priority using the Incident Settings dialog box. You can configure priority values from 1 to 9 in a table where urgency is measured on one axis, and impact is measured on the other.
In almost all cases, organizations will assign a priority of 1 to high impact/high urgency incidents, and a priority of 9 to low impact/low urgency incidents. Priority values determine the assigned incident target resolution time. You configure incident target resolution time on another page of the same dialog box. To configure incident priority calculation settings, perform the following steps:
1. Select the Settings node of the Administration workspace of the Service Manager console.
2. Double-click Incident Settings in the details pane. This opens the Incident Settings dialog box.
3. In the Priority Calculation section of the Incident Settings dialog box, shown in Figure 1, configure priority settings from 1 through 9 based on the combination of impact and urgency.
FIGURE 1 Priority calculation
Incident resolution time
You configure incident resolution time based on priority. The values that you assign for each incident priority will depend on the SLA you are working with, and with different organizations using different values for each priority. To configure default incident resolution time, perform the following steps:
1. Select the Settings node of the Administration workspace of the Service Manager console.
2. Double-click Incident Settings in the details pane. This opens the Incident Settings dialog box.
3. In the Resolution Time section of the Incident Settings dialog box, shown in Figure 2, specify the target resolution time for each priority.
FIGURE 2 Resolution time
Service Manager incidents are automatically prefixed with the letters IR (Incident Record) by default. You can modify this prefix by performing the following steps:
1. Select the Settings node of the Administration workspace of the Service Manager console.
2. Double-click Incident Settings in the details pane. This opens the Incident Settings dialog box.
3. Change the Prefix setting, shown in Figure 3, to the desired prefix for your organization.
FIGURE 3 Incident prefix
Manually creating incidents
To manually create an incident using the Service Manager console, perform the following steps:
1. Determine what configuration item will serve as the basis for the incident. You can choose between the following categories:
- Builds
- Business Services
- Computers
- Environments
- Printers
- Software
- Software Updates
- Users
2. Select the item for which you want to create the incident. For example, if there is a problem with a specific computer, you should select the computer under the Computers node, and on the Tasks menu, select the name of the computer, and then click Create Related Incident. This will load the Incident form.
3. In the Tasks pane of the Incident form, click Apply Template. This will open the Apply Template dialog box, shown in Figure 4. You can use this to apply an existing template that will automatically apply existing settings to the form. As a method of simplifying the process of incident creation, you can create incident templates for common incident profiles.
FIGURE 4 Apply template
4. Using the Incident form, shown in Figure 5, you can then configure the following additional settings:
- Affected User Which user is affected by the incident.
- Alternate Contact Method Alternate method of contacting the affected user, such as telephone number.
- Title Name for the incident.
- Description Description of the incident.
- Classification Category Allows you to classify the problem. Service Manager supports the creation of custom categories.
- Source Shows how the incident was entered into Service Manager. Manual incident creation is usually through the Service Manager console.
- Impact Incident impact rating.
- Urgency Incident urgency rating.
- Support Group Shows which support group is responsible for the incident.
- Assigned To IT Professional who the incident has been assigned to.
- Primary Owner Primary incident owner.
- Escalated Allows you to specify if the incident is escalated.
FIGURE 5 Incident form
Once the Incident has been created, it will be visible in the Work Items workspace of the Service Manager console, under the Incident Management node, as shown in Figure 6.
FIGURE 6 All incidents
From here, you can use the Tasks pane for the following:
- Reports Allows you to run an Incident KPI Trend, Incident Analyst, Incident Details, Incident Resolution, or List Of Incidents report based on the properties of the incident.
- Assign Allows you to assign the incident using the Select Objects dialog box, as shown in Figure 7.
FIGURE 7 Select objects
- Change Incident Status Allows you to activate, close, resolve, or set another status using the Other option. When you resolve an incident, you provide a resolution category and comments, as shown in Figure 8.
FIGURE 8 Resolve dialog box
- Create Change Request Allows you to create a change request. The incident will be configured as a related item.
- Create Problem Allows you to create a Problem. The incident will be configured as a related item.
- Create Service Request Allows you to create a Service Request. The incident will be configured as a related item.
- Edit Allows you to edit the incident.
- Escalate Or Transfer Allows you to escalate or transfer the incident. Figure 9 shows the Escalate Or Transfer dialog box. You use this dialog box to specify the support group to which the incident should be escalated or transferred.
FIGURE 9 Escalate Or Transfer
- Link Or Unlink To Parent Allows you to link to a parent incident, or unlink the incident from a parent incident.
- Link Problem Allows you to link to a Problem. You’ll learn about managing Service Manager problems later in this chapter.
- Link To New Parent Incident Allows you to create a new parent incident and link the incident to that parent.
- Ping Related Computer Allows you to send an ICMP request to the affected computer.
- Remote Desktop Allows you to make a remote desktop connection to the affected computer.
- Request User Input Sends a message from Service Manager to the user, requesting more information.
- Search For Knowledge Articles Allows you to search for related knowledge articles.
- Set First Response Or Comment Allows you to add comments to incidents.
Configuring email incidents
You can configure Service Manager to automatically create incidents based on email requests from users. If the user who sent the email is recognized by Service Manager as a user, Service Manager will automatically create a new incident.
If you have deployed Exchange in your organizational environment, you can configure Service Manager so that incidents can be created through email, by performing the following steps:
1. Install the SMTP server feature and related administrative consoles, as shown in Figure 10, on a computer that is not currently participating in your organization’s Exchange deployment.
FIGURE 10 SMTP server feature
2. Rename the server from SMTP Virtual Server #1, or the name it had been automatically assigned, to the FQDN of the server hosting this service.
3. In the list of domains, rename the domain to the FQDN of the server hosting this service.
4. Edit the properties of the SMTP server. On the Access tab, click Relay, click All Except The List Below, and ensure that Allow All Computers Which Successfully Authenticate To Relay Regardless Of The List Above, as shown in Figure 11, is enabled, and click OK.
FIGURE 11 Relay restrictions
5. On the Delivery tab, click Advanced. In the Advanced Delivery dialog box, type the following, as shown in Figure 12, and click OK:
- Masquerade Domain The root domain of the domain in which the server is a member.
- Fully Qualified Domain Name The name of an Exchange mailbox server (Exchange 2013), or server that hosts the Hub Transport role (Exchange 2010).
- Smart Host The name of an Exchange mailbox server (Exchange 2013) or server that hosts the Hub Transport role (Exchange 2010).
FIGURE 12 Advanced delivery
6. Close the SMTP server’s properties and share the <SystemDrive>:\Inetpub\Mailroot folder so that it is accessible to the Service Manager account.
7. In the Administration workspace of the Service Manager console, double-click Incident Settings in the details pane. This opens the Incident Settings dialog box.
8. In the Incoming E-mail settings page of the Incident Settings dialog, configure the following settings, as shown in Figure 13, and then click OK:
- SMTP Service Drop Folder Location This will be the UNC path of the Drop folder under the Mailroot folder that you shared in step 6.
- SMTP Service Bad Folder Location This will be the UNC path of the Badmail folder under the Mailroot folder that you shared in step 6.
- Maximum Number Of E-mail Messages To Process At A Time This is the number of email messages that you want Server Manager to import at a time.
- Turn On Incoming E-mail Processing Enable this setting.
FIGURE 13 Incident settings
9. In Exchange:
- Configure *.servername.domain.name (where servername.domain.name is the FQDN of the SMTP server configured earlier) as an accepted domain.
- Configure a receive connector to accept anonymous inbound traffic from the SMTP server configured earlier.
- Configure a send connector to route email to the SMTP server when addressed to the *@servername.domain.name email domain.
- Configure a mail contact in Exchange that will be used as the address for messages that should be converted as incidents. For example helpdesk@SYD-SmanagerDW.tailspintoys.internal.
Email incident templates
Email incident templates are used to convert email messages into Service Manager incidents. When Service Manager detects new messages in the drop folder on a specially configured SMTP server, it will take information from the email message and use it with an email incident template, to populate a new Service Manager incident. The process of creating an email incident template is very similar to that of creating any other type of incident template.
To create an email incident template, perform the following steps:
1. Select the Templates node in the Library workspace of the Service Manager console.
2. On the Tasks menu, click Templates, and then click Create Template.
3. In the Create Template dialog box, fill out the following settings, as shown in Figure 14:
- Name: E-mail incident template
- Class: Incident
- Management Pack: Service Manager Incident Management Configuration Library
FIGURE 14 Create template
4. Clicking OK on the Create Template dialog box will open the Incident Template form. In the form, configure the following settings, as shown in Figure 15:
- Title: E-mail Template Form
- Classification Category: E-Mail Problems
- Impact: Select the initial impact to assign to incidents submitted through email.
- Urgency: Select the initial urgency to assign to incidents submitted through email.
- Support Group: Select the support group that will be initially assigned incidents sent through email.
FIGURE 15 Incident template
5. Click OK to close the incident template.
