Resolving tickets with the help of knowledge articles

Knowledge articles are created to document information that can be referred to when working on different tasks. These articles can provide information about known issues and their resolutions, configuration or set up information for common assets in the organization, or any information that should be shared in the organization.

BMC Helix ITSM allows users to leverage the knowledge articles by displaying a list of related knowledge articles when creating or updating a ticket. Recommended Knowledge displayed for a ticket are the results based on a search conducted by using key text in the ticket. Retired articles are not displayed under Recommended Knowledge. You can search for retired articles only through the global search or advanced search by using the Search for knowledge resources option.

You can relate an existing knowledge article to a ticket so that users can view information that was useful when you worked on a request. Relating the knowledge resource to a ticket updates the usage percentage of the resource and increases its credibility and use for resolving a request. It will also increase the resource's relevance to similar type of requests, placing it higher in the list when Recommended Knowledge for similar requests is displayed.

For basic information about BMC Knowledge Management, see Knowledge Management overview.

Example of resolving an incident by using an existing knowledge article

Jennie Tennyson, a Level 1 Service Agent, is working on an incident reported by Greg Johnson, the Director of HR, who got the Blue Screen of Death after rebooting his laptop.

Jennie is working on Greg's incident request related to the Blue Screen of Death displayed after he rebooted his laptop. Jennie opens the incident request, and views the list of resources displayed on the right pane of the Incident Request screen.
These resources are searched for based on keywords identified by the system in the incident ticket. For the current incident, knowledge articles related to the blue screen of death are displayed. One of the knowledge articles is related to a security patch that was recently deployed to the type of laptop that Greg uses, and is known to cause blue screen issues.
She clicks on the Knowledge Article to preview its contents.
The information provided can be used to resolve Greg's issue, so Jennie contacts Greg and provides him with the information provided in the Knowledge Article.
She clicks the Share icon and emails the link to Greg, for his reference.
She wants to make sure that she is updated whenever the contents of the Knowledge Article are updated, so she clicks to follow the article.
She saves the Knowledge Article to the ticket so that it is linked to the ticket and can be referred to when anyone looks at the ticket. She clicks the Save to Ticket option to save the Knowledge Article to the ticket so that it is listed under Saved Resources. Users can view the related Knowledge Article as a resource that was helpful in resolving the incident when they refer to this incident ticket.
Note
The icon indicates that the resource has been saved to the ticket.
Upon further investigation, she realizes that in addition to the steps provided in the Knowledge Article, Greg needs to apply an additional fix to complete the process. The additional fix to be applied to resolve the issue completely is not included in the Knowledge Article, so Jennie opens the Knowledge Article, clicks the Activity tab on the right panel of the Knowledge Article, and types in a new post related to the additional step.
The Knowledge Article helped Jennie resolve the issue at hand, she clicks Yes to mark the Knowledge Article as a helpful resource This improves the rating of the Knowledge Article as a resource, and list it higher in the order when displayed as a Recommended Knowledge for similar issues.
She clicks the far left side of the screen to navigate back to the ticket.
She then marks the incident record as Resolved, provides the appropriate Resolution categorization and Product Resolution categorization and then closes the ticket.

Jennie notices that the reuse count of the article has incremented. When an article is related to an incident, and it is used to resolve that incident ticket, the reuse count of the article increments. The reuse count indicates usefulness of the article to resolve incident tickets. However, if the article is only related or pinned the to the incident without using it to resolve the incident, the reuse count of the article does not increment.

Jennie can also choose to create a new Knowledge Article to capture information she thinks may be useful to other service desk agents to resolve similar issues.

To filter knowledge articles

While working on an incident, problem investigation, or known error ticket, the ticket assignee can pin the knowledge articles that they found useful for resolving the ticket. Other agents can view the pinned knowledge articles to understand how an incident was resolved by the ticket assignee.

Use the appropriate filter in the Recommended knowledge section under the Resources tab based on your requirement:

Filter	Description
All	View all pinned and unpinned knowledge articles from all pages. By default, the All filter is selected for incidents with any status except for Closed.
Pinned	View the pinned knowledge articles together from all pages. By default, the Pinned filter is selected for incidents with Closed status.
Unpinned	View the unpinned knowledge articles together from all pages.

The filter also appears in the BMC Helix ITSM ticket preview.

To copy field information from Knowledge Article while resolving incident requests

While creating an incident from Smart Recorder, if you open a Knowledge Article (KA), click Save and Resolve, the Operational Category and Product Category field information of the KA are copied to the Operational Category and Product Category of the Incident ticket. Only the primary categories are copied. If the incident fields already have values, the following warning appears to confirm the copy action:

Click Yes to copy the information from the Knowledge Article.

If you have set a primary company in a knowledge article, then when you add Operational Category and Product Category of that company, they become primary by default. If you have not set a primary company and the categories as primary in the article, edit it, and manually update them to primary so that these categories are copied to the incident when you use the Save and Resolve functionality for the incident.

For more information about creating Knowledge articles, see Creating knowledge articles for sharing information.

Instructions for classic interfaces

View instructions for Mid Tier

If you have installed BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management with BMC Service Request Management, you can use knowledge search to look for existing documented solutions to similar incidents, or to help identify the root cause during a problem investigation.

Before you assign an incident request, determine whether you can resolve the incident yourself. Use the Incident Management Incident Matching feature or BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management to look for matching or similar incident requests, problem investigations, known errors, and solution entries.

Before you can use BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management with Incident Management, you must be licensed to use it.

To search for a knowledge article from a BMC Helix ITSM: Service Desk record

Open the record that you are working on.
Click Functions > Search Knowledge Base to launch the Search Knowledge dialog box.
An advanced search is performed automatically, using values from the Categorization tab of the Incident, Problem, or Known Error record, and the search results are displayed.
To modify the search criteria, click the Advanced Search link in the Search Knowledge dialog box and modify the criteria as required.
If you prefer to search by keyword only, clear the check boxes in the Product Categorization and Operational Categorization sections. For more information, see How knowledge articles are found .
Select a knowledge article in the list of search results to view it.
(Optional) If you find that the information in the knowledge article is useful, click Use.
For Incident records, clicking Use populates the fields in the Categorization tab with the resolutions categories that are defined in the knowledge article. Additionally, a Resolved by relationship with the knowledge article is created. For more information, see Improving findability through categorization.
Alternatively, you can click Relate to associate the knowledge article to the Incident.