Welcome to the Digital Portfolio Management (DPM) Community series!
This article will share information and answer FAQs about how Needs Attentional Panel can be configured by SN Admins in Digital Portfolio Management workspace.
One of the first priorities for a service owner is firefighting. They want to know if there are any urgent and/or critical issues occurring for their solutions. If there are, they want to know what it is, what is the status, who is working on it, what's the timeline and what's the impact. This helps them to proactively communicate with their stakeholder group and get ahead of the issue.
Thus, every morning, a DPM manager goes to their DPM workspace in the morning to see if anything needs their immediate attention before they start their meetings for the day.
Starting in DPM version 4.2.4 (Utah release), this Needs attention Panel is configurable, allowing SN admins to choose the types of records DPM Manager should pay attention to. Such as what's the critical incidents or outages impacting my service.
Is there a video or a session I can watch that walks me through the configuration process?
You can watch our DPM Office hours session on Needs Attention Panel, in which we share more information about how to configure Needs Attention Panel. You can access the attached slides as well. Release related details might be available on this KB article.
How can I access the configurations and what's the Table Name?
Admins can access these configurations by selecting All > Needs Attention > Needs Attention Attributes.
There is only one table used for Needs Attention attributes, although, the name has changed in various releases.
Table: dpm_na_attribute (Xanadu+ only)
Table: dpm_needs_attention_attribute (Utah and Washington only)
What are all the Needs Attention Attributes?
|
Attribute |
What it shows? |
|
Critical incidents |
P1, P2 and accepted Major incidents created in the last day |
|
Outages |
Planned, unplanned outages or degradations created in the last day |
|
Changes |
High risk or Emergency changes created or closed in the last day |
|
Critical problems |
P1 and P2 problems created or closed in the last day [Available Post Aug 2024 release] |
|
Alerts |
Critical [does not include Major] alerts created in the last day |
|
Risks |
Hardware models and software products nearing end of life in more than three weeks but less than one month |
|
Audits |
Open Follow-on tasks related to one of six Audits relating to Business Applications |
For all of these attributes - Other query conditions may be applied automatically, for example, the conditions connecting the parent/child relationships of items.
What are all the various plugins I need to install for each attribute?
The DPM app ships with multiple OOTB attributes. But for some specific attributes additional plugins are required. Please see the details below:
| Needs attention attribute | Plugin required |
| Critical incidents (or: P1 and P2 and major incidents, if MIM is installed) |
none, or optionally, Major Incident Management [com.snc.incident.mim] |
| Outages | none |
| Changes (Emergency and/or high-risk changes) | none |
| Critical problems | none |
| Alerts (Severity 1 alerts, if Event Management is installed) | Event Management [com.glideapp.itom.snac] |
| Risks (Technology Portfolio Management, end of support risks, if APM is installed) |
|
| Audits | none |
What are the fields to be populated for each Attribute?
| Field | Description |
| Table | Specifies a table to collect records against. For details, see Using the Table and Condition Fields below. (Field introduced in Xanadu.) |
| Condition | A condition applied to the table to limit the records. For example, it is common to collect only records created in the last 24 hours. (Field introduced in Xanadu.) |
| Script | Deprecated in Xanadu. Generates an array of Needs attention objects. Each one is displayed as a card on the homepage and in the Needs attention sidebar. For details, see Writing the Script field below. (Script field is replaced by Table and Condition fields.) |
| Solution type |
A drop-down field to apply each attribute to one or more solution types. The solution types options are:
|
| UX list | A searchable field to assign what the count that the user sees while viewing the Needs attention cards on the homepage. For example, for a service, the number of incidents is displayed. The user can click on the count to see the list of records that make up the count. The UX list field is the UX list [sys_ux_list] record that customizes the list view for that table. |
| Active / Show on homepage / Show on Needs attention |
If any of these items are set to false (unchecked), then the Needs attention attribute will not show up on the DPM homepage or in the Needs attention sidebar or the preview page. When the Active item is checked, its placement can be further customized to show on the homepage and/or show in the Needs attention sections of the preview page and the details page sidebar. |
What are some of the User personalization defaults available?
When a user adds a solution to their homepage display, default values are applied but can be personalized by the user.
Thresholds
On the DPM Workspace homepage, solutions (services or business applications) are displayed as cards. Each card displays up to four Needs attention attributes with the following threshold levels:
- Good: If the count for an attribute is less than the moderate threshold, then that attribute has a good (green check) status.
- Moderate: If the attribute is equal to or greater than the moderate status, but less than the sever status, then that attribute has a cautionary (orange circle) status.
- Severe: If the count is equal to or greater than the severe status, then that attribute has a severe (red triangle) status.
Solution card status:
- If any attribute is a severe status, then the solution card is marked red.
- If any attribute is a moderate status (and none are severe), then the solution card is marked orange.
- If any attribute is a good status, then the solution card is marked green.
Notes:
- The cards are sorted by severity and the most severe cards are shown first.
- The table ships with default threshold values for each solution that users add to their homepage.
- DPM admins (sn_dpm.dpm_admin) can edit the default threshold values.
- Users can personalize these threshold values by selecting Personalize > Edit status conditions. The edits apply to the user's DPM homepage. Once personalized, the default threshold values won't display again for the logged in user.
Order
Each solution card can have up to four attributes, shown in order by the Order field.
- The Order field provides the default value when solutions are added to a user’s homepage.
- Users can personalize the order values per solution.
Using the Table and Condition fields (Introduced in Xanadu Release, Aug 2024)
Any table related to a DPM solution record can be selected, but there must be a method in the 'sn_dpm.DPMNeedsAttentionUtils' script include that supports the collecting of data related to the table, and mapping the data back to the solution. See the 'getOneSolutionsNACardItems()' method for examples of this. The Table and Condition fields are used -- along with the script include code -- to generate an array of objects containing the data needed for the Needs attention cards for the homepage and Needs attention sections of the details and preview pages. These fields were introduced in Xanadu to replace the Script field.
Writing the Script field (Pre-Xanadu Release Only)
As of Xanadu, this field is no longer used and is replaced with the Table and Condition fields. For more information on this method please refer to this KB article.
Please Note: Any customizations that you make changes the code. The result is that your customizations will override future upgrades to DPM.
Make simple customizations to Needs attention records in the records themselves. You can:
- Hide irrelevant attributes with the Active and Show properties.
- Make simple changes to the queries in the query strings themselves. Examples:
- Limit Incidents to P1 (instead of OOB P1 and P2).
- Adjust date ranges to cover the last three days instead of yesterday only.
More complex customizations would include adding attributes for solution tables not covered out-of-the-box. If you need to extend the Needs attention library and write attributes covering additional solution tables, then it's suggested that you write your code in the attribute records, and if it makes sense, extend the DPMNeedsAttentionUtilsSNC library through an extension point.
What’s the Release history for this feature?
- Release Utah: Original feature release
- Xanadu: Optimization release. Change in table name and some fields.
Make sure release upgrades are synced and if there are any more issues, please create a support case for the SN Support team.
Stay tuned for more Community Content!
Refer to the DPM Community Hub and the DPM Toolkit Community Article Series to view more resources on DPM.
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