Getting started with incident management

To enable your staff members and clients to submit an incident, you must configure the following:

Roles

Roles enable you to configure hierarchy in your organization. You can control the level of visibility that users have on the data by using roles.

For example, by configuring and assigning roles, you can enable users to open incidents on behalf of other users. For more information about configuring roles, see Managing roles.

Users

BMC Remedyforce supports the following user types:

To add staff members, see Adding or editing users. For change managers and release coordinators, you need Salesforce Platform license or you can assign the ServiceDesk Change Manager permission set to such users.

If you have your clients stored in an LDAP server, you can import these clients into BMC Remedyforce. For more information, see Importing Salesforce Platform license users from an LDAP server.

BMC recommends that you assign permission sets to your users. When you are upgrading to a major release, most of the profile permissions are updated automatically for permission sets. If you do not assign permission sets, you need to manually update permissions of each profile.

Accounts

Accounts represent customers, organizations, departments, or other parties to which you want to give access to a set of configuration items and clients.

To understand the field descriptions and for more information about adding accounts, see Creating accounts. Also, see Salesforce Help.

Queues

Create the queues to which incidents, service requests, tasks, and other records will be assigned. Your staff members need to monitor the designated queues and assign records to themselves or other staff members. You might have a dedicated member (based on your team size and number of requests) in your team who monitors the queues and does assignments.

For more information about adding queues, see Configuring queues.

Categories

Categories help you to classify data for reporting purposes. While raising an incident, clients raise the incident on a category, such as Hardware and you can configure a workflow that assigns all the incidents with Hardware category to the Hardware and Maintenance queue.

You can also create a parent-child relationship between categories by defining category types. Some categories are provided to you out-of-the-box, such as Account Administration, Network, and so on.

For information about adding categories, see Creating categories.

Status

Status of a record helps you to track the record through its life cycle. The following points help you to understand the difference in the terminologies used to create a status:

• State: Determines if a record is opened or closed. Status will either have state opened or closed.
• Status: Determines where the record is in the life cycle, such as accepted, assigned.
• Stage: Grouping of various status values, such as Active, Approved, Broken Down, Development, and so on are grouped under In Progress stage. A stage tracks a record from Opening to Closure. The following stages are provided:
  • Opened
  • Acknowledged
  • In Process
  • Closed

You must assign the status that you add to one of the stages.

For more information about adding status, see Creating status records.

Impact-urgency-priority

Impact and urgency values of a record determine the priority assigned to the record. By default, some urgency, impact, and priority values are provided. The following figure shows how priority is calculated depending on the impact and urgency values:

Determine if you need additional impact, urgency, or priority values. If yes, also determine how the urgency and impact values will determine the priority. For more information, see Creating impacts, Creating urgencies, and Creating priorities.

Templates

Using templates, you can pre-populate fields on a form, which reduces the need to enter commonly used data, or create records to provide an automated workflow process. Templates help you to configure commonly used workflows, ensure consistency in the way information is captured, increase productivity and efficiency, and reduce errors.

Prepare a list of commonly occurring incidents in your environment, the tasks that are related to such incidents. Based on your requirements, add the templates.

You can also link tasks to your templates. For example, for a commonly occurring incident you know that some tasks must be done. You can create such tasks and link those tasks to the incident template. For example, for an incident template for virus outbreak in a network, the staff member must perform the following actions:

• Ensure that the latest version of antivirus is installed on the machines.
• Scan the machine to detect the virus.
• Reboot the machine.

Create task template for these actions, and link these templates to the incident template. When an incident is raised by using this template, tasks for these actions will be created and linked to the incident. The task templates also ensure that the staff member does not forget any important task. For more information, see Creating templates.

CMDB

Configuration items (CIs) are the items in your IT environment that you want to track. The Configuration management database (CMDB) stores the CIs and relationships among CIs. These CIs are categorized in different classes. View all the classes in the CMDB Manager by clicking the Remedyforce CMDB tab. Read about the implementation of CMDB in BMC Remedyforce in the CMDB 2.0 architecture section.

Prepare a list of CIs in your environment and add the CIs in the Remedyforce CMDB tab. For more information, see Creating and updating configuration items.

You might have your CIs available in another application. BMC Remedyforce enables you to import CIs from any of the following applications:

• Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager
• BMC Atrium CMDB
• BMC Atrium Discovery
• BMC BladeLogic Client Automation
• Dell KACE
• BMC Client Management

Knowledge articles

You can add the following types of knowledge articles in BMC Remedyforce:

• FAQ
• How to
• Known Error
• Problem Solution

All your staff members can add, update, and retire knowledge articles.

Prepare a list of staff members whom you want to enable to publish knowledge articles. Select the Remedyforce Knowledge User check box for these users on the User Details page. For more information, see Enabling users to publish, retire, or check out a knowledge article.

For more information about creating knowledge articles, see Creating a knowledge article.

Workflows

Workflows help you in automating frequently occurring actions in your service desk. For example, you can create a workflow to send an email message to clients whenever status of the incident raised by them is updated. BMC Remedyforce provides you some workflows out of the box. All these workflows are inactive by default. You must activate the workflows that you need. For information about activating a workflow, see Configuring workflows.

The following workflows are provided out of the box for incidents:

• Notify incident owner when change request linked to incident is closed
• Notify incident owner when each linked task is closed
• Notify incident owner when final task linked to incident is closed
• Notify staff when no action has occurred for 24 hours
• Notify the assigned staff member when an incident has been marked for follow up
• Notify the assigned staff member when an incident is created and assigned to the staff member
• Notify the assigned staff member when an incident is reassigned to the staff member
• Notify the assigned staff member when an incident is reopened
• Notify the client when an incident is closed
• Notify the client when an incident is created
• Notify the client when an incident is reopened
• Update the incident’s status through email

Prepare a list of workflows that you will need in your service desk. Create the workflows that are not provided out of the box. For more information, see Salesforce Help.

Email templates

You can associate email templates with workflows or approval processes. Whenever a workflow is triggered, an email message is sent to required users. By default, email templates that are associated with the out-of-the-box workflows are provided with the package.

If required, you can customize these email templates or create new email templates and associate them with the required workflows. For more information, see Creating an email template and Customizing an email template.

Possible ways of creating incidents

The following table lists the methods by which your clients can create incidents in BMC Remedyforce and the actions that the system administrators must perform to enable clients:

In addition to these options, staff members can also use the Incident form in the Remedyforce Consoles tab to raise incidents.

Administrator settings

The Remedyforce Administration tab is one-stop location for all the configurations that are available in BMC Remedyforce. It also contains links to the Salesforce Setup area. All the settings are categorized in various tiles. The following settings are related to setting up incidents:

Self Service

You can create the Self Service web site for your clients that they can use to:

• submit incidents (or tickets) and service requests
• search for solution to an issue
• read knowledge articles

When you install BMC Remedyforce, you must configure the Self Service site in Salesforce. For more information, see Configuring the Self Service site for clients.

After creating the Self Service site, you can customize the behavior of the site for your users. All the settings are provided in the Configure Self Service tile in the Remedyforce Administration tab. For more information about these settings, see Configuring the Self Service site for clients.

For commonly occurring issues, you can create templates for Incidents and enable these templates to be displayed in Self Service. For more information, see Creating templates.

Use Salesforce Translation Workbench to localize Self Service. For more information, see Localizing Self Service.

Reports

Staff members and system administrators can use the Reports tab to view predefined reports. You can also create reports based on your requirements. However, only the system administrators can create additional report types.

For system administrators, data is also available in the form of charts and tables in the Dashboards tab. To enable staff members with Salesforce or Salesforce Platform license access the Dashboards tab, assign the Manage Dashboard profile-level permission.

Testing your environment

BMC Remedyforce

• Ensure that you are able to create an incident in the Remedyforce Console tab.
• Ensure that you are able to create templates and attach task or incident templates to the template. Ensure that you can create incidents by using these templates.
• If you have configured email listeners to enable your clients to submit an incident by sending an email message, send an email message and ensure that an incident is logged in the Remedyforce Console tab.
• If you have activated workflows, ensure that the workflows are triggered at the configured condition.

Self Service

• Ensure that you are able to log on to Self Service by using the logon credentials of a client.
• Ensure that you can view knowledge articles.
• Ensure that you can submit a ticket.
• Ensure that you can update the profile and change password.

FAQs