Is a planned outage normally created from a change?

[Param Tiwana]

Outages can be created from both Incident and Problem tickets - but when it comes to a change my expectation was that this would enable creation of a "Planned" Outage (cmdb_ci_outage) and the ci contained within the change. This would then show up in the BSM as a planned outage action icon for the ci.

Is it best practice only to create these types of outages from incident and problem tickets only and use the forward schedule of change for planned outages?? I can see a real benefit in creating planned outages from change - as these would then be visible to anybody viewing the ci from the BSM.

Would appreciate if somebody could provide some best practice guidance.

[tony_fugere]

I don't think there is a written rule on this or best practice necessarily. If it makes sense to your processes to create a "planned" Outage from a Change, by all means, build that into your implementation. It makes sense to me to include this type of functionality to track the planned outages as well as the unplanned ones. Just copy the UI Action from INC or PRB and modify to have it create a "planned" record from the CHG.

[Param Tiwana]

Thanks Tony, for taking the time to respond. This was a question posed by one of my customers and I realised that OOTB, ServiceNow didn't have this functionality available. But as you point out, this can be copied from INC or PRB.

[HugoFirst]

It's been a while since this question was asked and answered.     But things appear to have changed, ( we're on Eureka Patch 2 ) and I want to provide an update.

The UI Action is now on the task table.   So the "Create Outage" action is "available" for all record types ( incident, problem, change, etc. ).   You don't have to copy the UI action around but you do need to alter the condition field if you want it to appear on a change record.   Here's the condition I use:

current.getRecordClassName() == 'incident' || current.getRecordClassName() == 'problem' || current.getRecordClassName() == 'change_request'

(Sorry I don't know how to do those fancy copy/paste operations that give you the formatted look of code )

Now to figure out how to copy the business services from the incident/change records to the outage record. Or should it be Outage records?...