On-call trigger rules and assignment group issue

[chedley]

I like many others are testing the On-call scheduling functionality (Helsinki). By the documentation, trigger rules will not work if the assignment_group or assigned_to are not blank, and are dependent on executing the rule by basically any other conditions.

Our use case is the opposite. Our Service Desk always knows the group that needs to be assigned, but doesn't know the assignee and we want to use on-call to handle this.

What is the work-around for allowing trigger rules to work when I've set the assignment_group in my Incident?

There are far too many permutations of categories and subcategories and priorities to hardcode 100s of trigger rules

UC:

I open a new Incident, categorize it appropriately, and set the assignment_group. I want the rota to then be checked, and the assigned_to set based on primary. Using On-call: Escalations by email workflow, if they don't respond, I want to then escalate to the Secondary.

None of this is possible via the OOB trigger rules by nature of them not executing if the assignment group is filled.

Any thoughts?

I've referenced https://hi.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0547296 and many other community articles with no success. I also looked at making a specific business rule like in this link (thanks dvp for your response there) but then I'm just setting the assigned_to and not actually getting to use the workflow with escalations.

[Michael Ritchie]

On-Call Scheduling Trigger Rules are an extension of assignment rules.   Assignment rules do not run if the group is automatically filled in so this does impact trigger rules as well.   This has been an issue for some customers that especially leverage the Configuration Item's support group to automate task assignment.   At K15, I led the Incident 201 lab that covered this very use case and provide a step by step tutorial on how to setup a business rule that launches the on-call workflow.   Hopefully you have access to download the content:

https://community.servicenow.com/docs/DOC-2852

Lab 10

[chedley]

Thanks Michael for the response (as usual). Reading through lab 10 sounds like it would get us where we want, but to clarify, if we were to skip the CI assignment group part, and just set an assignment workflow per group, we would essentially get the same result?

We simply want to set the assignment group of our choice, and fire the escalation workflow associated to that group.

[Michael Ritchie]

A couple of thoughts... This lab was based on a recent (at time of lab) conversation I had with an existing customer there the CMDB drove all the assignments.   They also wanted flexibility into letting each group determine which On-Call workflow to use, hence the new workflow field on the assignment group table.

If you want every group to use teh same workflow you can skip the new workflow field on the assignment group and just hard code it in your business rule.   Then I would change the business rule condition to look for assignment group being populated and it changing.   Then you can skip the first portion of the business rule that sets the assignment group from the CI and just go straight to the eventQueue() function call passing the workflow you want to launch.

[sushmitha4]

Hi Michael,

I tried the solution and it worked perfectly in my developer instance but not working in my project instance. So i thought of calling the workflow directly from business rule but I think I am passing the wrong parameters over there. Kindly help me on this