Using the incident management application

Incident management is one of the key applications of Service-Now. As per the ITIL definition, an unplanned interruption to an IT service or reduction in the quality of an IT service is referred to as an incident. Application login error, antivirus error, server room fan and so on can be considered as incidents examples.

Getting ready

To step through this recipe, all you need is an active Service-Now instance, valid credentials, and an admin/ITIL role.

How to do it…

1. Open any browser standard browser.
2. Type the Service-Now instance web address (http://{instance_name}.service-now.com) provided by your organization in the address bar, now enter your credentials in respective fields and press enter button.
3. On the left-hand side, type Incident in the search box to view the Incident application. To create a new incident record, you can directly type incident.do in the search box. If you want to see all incident records, then you can type incident.list in the search box directly:
   

   Service-Now Incident Management module

4. If you want to create a new record by the incident application then you can click on Create New module. After clicking on Create New module the incident form is opened on screen, now enter the relevant fields on incident form and click on submit button:
   

   Incident Form

5. After submission of the form, an incident number will be generated for an example INC0000055, which will serve as a reference number for the users
6. Once the form is submitted, an incident is assigned to the respective support group to resolve it. Any group member can check a new incident under My Group Work andassign it to them. After resolving the incident they can click on the Resolve Incident button.

How it works…

The incident table extends the task table by which it gets all the properties of the task table. When you click on Create New module, an incident form appears and you fill in the details. After clicking on the Submit button, Service-Now generates an incident number with the unique number called SysID. For the assignment of the support group, a relationship is defined under System Policy Application in Assignment Lookup Rules, Assignment and Data lookup Definitions modules which store the relation of category and subcategory and when a condition is met, it assigns an incident to the support group.

There's more…

End users or users without any role are not allowed to create the incident from IT view as they don’t have access to view this application but ITIL users can create the incident from the IT view. It is important to note that there is no workflow for incident application.

See also

• To read more about the incident management click at https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/geneva-it-service-management/page/product/incident_management/concept/c_IncidentManagement.html