Newbie questions: How to keep track of all the tickets that passed through our group?

[titus]

ServiceNow only keeps track of Originiating Group and Assignment Group.   Does it also keep track of groups who "touched" the ticket?

[rahulpandey]

I am not sure about exactly about group fields, but there is a way to track the life cycle of a ticket

Metric Definition Support - ServiceNow Wiki

[Uncle Rob]

It keeps it in the activity log, but that's not a place you want to go reporting on things.   This is a common enough request in ServiceNow though "I want to report on the number of times X happened, where X is an activity on a task".

Without add-ons like performance analytics, the best way is to use Metric Definitions.   The good news is, what you're looking for is already being captured (at least on Incident.. you may need to make a bigger one for task if you work multiple task types).   The metric instance will track the duration each group possessed a ticket.

The real trick is reporting, which usually requires a Database View between the task table you care about and the Metric Instances for that table.   Good news there too as all the OOB Task tables that have OOB Metric Definitions also have reporting views (such as "Incident Metrics")

[carlh]

I must have read this Metric Definitions 20 times by now but I just don't get it.  

I'm not too worried about the duration an incident was with a group at this time and I don't see my exact scenario covered. I'm sure like most things I'm over complicating it.

We're looking for how many times escalation was Requested, Accepted, and Rejected.

We added in a couple of custom fields and business rules to handle escalations but it wasn't thought through well enough when it was created.

Here's how it works:

When we want to escalate to another group, we type the name of the group in the "Request Team Escalation" field.   When it's submitted, a notification goes out to the team being requested and the "Accept Escalation" field is set to "Pending"

The team being escalated to has 2 choices on the field to select.

1.) they can Accept - which will change the Assignment Group field to Same as Request Team Escalation and will clear both fields

2.) they can Reject - selecting reject will make comments required to explain why it was rejected and trigger notification back to the requestor.    

The issue we have is that we clear the Reject or Accept from the "Accept Escalation" field so it's ready for the next.

The only useful report I have from this is Incident's where "Accept Escalation" = "Pending"

I'm looking for a way to capture the Rejected and Accepted answers before they are cleared in order to have a good history on all escalations to other teams.

Ideas other than metrics or performance analytics would be greatly appreciated .

Thank you,

Carl

[march]

Hi Carl,

Disclaimer : This is probably not the nicer solution, but will do the job):

create a custom table with 7 fields:

- Incident Number -> String

- Active -> true/false

- Assignment Group -> reference to the group table

- Request Team Escalation -> reference tot he group table

- Date/Time Escalation Started -> date and time field (alternatively, you can just consider using the sys_created field)

- Date/Time Escalation Answered -> date and time field.

- Status -> Choice -> Requested, Accepted, Rejected

Then you create a business rules on your incident table that trigger when the "Accept Escalation" field is changed to Pending, Accept and Reject.

- When "Accept Escalation" change to Pending -> you populate the "Incident Number", "Assignment Group", "Request Team Escalation" and "Date/Time Escalation Started" fields of the custom table (also set the field active = true).

- If the Escalation is accepted ("Accept Escalation" change to "Accepted") -> you update the "Status" with value "Accepted" and the "Date/Time Escalation Answered" with the current date and time (also set the field active = false).  

- If the Escalation is rejected ("Accept Escalation" change to "Rejected") -> you update the "Status" with value "Rejected" and the "Date/Time Escalation Answered" with the current date and time (also set the field active = false).  

Then you should be able to create nice report from that custom table.

Marcus