Creating an incident request record by using a template

To use a template to create an incident

1. On the Incident Management console, click Create or Create for Company (in a Hub and Spoke environment).

2. (Hub and spoke environment only) When asked to identify the company you are creating the record for, select the company from the list, and then click Create.

   The Incident form opens on the spoke server of the company you chose. Continue with the rest of this procedure.
   The record that you create for the selected company is created and submitted on the spoke server where the company is defined.

3. In the Customer or Contact field on the new Incident Request form, enter the customer's or the contact's information as described in Adding-or-modifying-a-customer-profile.
4. Check the rest of the customer information for accuracy.
5. Enter the incident request details in the Notes field.
   • If you have added text to the Notes field before selecting a template, the Notes text is preserved and appended to the Notes text that is defined in the template.
   • The template overwrites the fields other than Notes.

6. To view or add attachments, click the Browse Attachment icon of the Notes field.

   The administrator must enable this icon. For more details, see Applying system settings.

7. In the Template box:

   • If you know the template name, type a few characters of the template name and then press Enter.
   • If you don't know the template name, click inside the Template field and then press Enter.

   • If you want to change your selection of a template, clear the text in the Template field and enter or select the template again.
     

     In this case, the text in the  Notes  field is preserved to avoid losing user-provided text. When you select and apply a new template, the Notes field is appended with new information. If the previous information in the  Notes  field is not relevant, manually clear this information from the  Notes  field.

   A list of templates available to your default support group appears in the Incident Template Selection form.

8. From the hierarchical list, select the appropriate template and click Select.
9. In the Summary field, enter a brief description.
10. In the Service field, select the business service CI from menu. (You can also enter the name of the business service. After you enter the first three characters, a list of matching business services appears, from which you can select the required service.)
    The business services that appear in the menu have a relationship type of Used By, for the customer directly or to the customer's organization. Use this field if you are creating the incident against a business service. 

11. If the incident request was caused by a CI, select the required CI. (You can also enter the required CI in the CI field. After you enter the first three characters, a list of matching business services are displayed from which you can select the required service.)

    This actions creates a relationship between the incident request record and the CI record. The CIs that appear in the menu are all the other CIs related to the customer that are not business service CIs. If the CI you are looking for does not appear in this list, click the button beside the CI field to open a CI search form from which you can search for all CIs. Use this field if you are creating the incident against a CI.

    • When you associate a CI to an incident request, the Service Desk application automatically maps the incident's resolution categorization to the CI's product categorization.
    • The CI field on the incident form refers to the causal CI that is the root cause of the incident. You can associate only one CI to this field. The CIs associated from the Relationship tab are related to the incident with relationship types such as Related to, Restores, or Impacts. You can relate multiple CIs to the incident from the Relationship tab.
12. Enter the Impact, Urgency, and Priority of the incident.
13. Select the required type of incident from the Incident Type menu:
    • User Service Restoration—Used for typical service restoration requests (for example, a request to restore printing services). 
    • User Service Request—Used if the incident request is a simple question or a request for information (for example, a request for how-to information). 
    • Infrastructure Restoration—Used if the incident request is more focused on the restoration of infrastructure service. Typically, these types of incident requests are reported by system management tools (for example, if an incident is detected on a piece of network infrastructure by system monitoring software). 
    • Infrastructure Event—Used when a system management tool registers an event that does not require infrastructure restoration.
    • Security Incident—Used when you want to create security incidents. Typically, these incidents are assigned to the security team.

14. (Optional) Add or delete the task or task groups available on the Tasks tab. 
    The fields are automatically populated only when the selected incident template has associated task or task group templates.

    In the Task Template form, if the value of the Status field of a task or task group is set to Potential or Inactive , on the new incident request form, the value of the  Status  field of the task or task group is automatically set to  Closed . For more information, see Adding-tasks-to-an-incident-request.

15. Complete the rest of the incident request form as appropriate.
     Use the Contact field to record the name of someone who reports an incident on behalf of someone else. For example, use this field if an administrative assistant is reporting an incident on behalf of an executive.
    When using the Contact field to record the name of the person reporting the incident, use the Customer field to record the name of the person experiencing the incident. This is especially important if the person experiencing the incident is registered as a VIP or as a sensitive customer. It also ensures that Incident Management displays the set of business CIs in the Service field selection list that are directly related to the person experiencing the incident, and so on.

    Tip

    If your organization uses categorizations (Operational Categorization and Product Categorization) to help assign incident requests, but none are supplied by the template, click the Categorization tab to open a dialog box where you can record this information. For detailed discussions of Operational Categorization, search for discussions about it at https://community.bmc.com.

16. Click Save.