Best Practices Question - CI required in incident record

William Busby · ‎12-16-2019

I've worked with several companies and some of them have added the CI field to the incident form as a mandatory attribute. This doesn't seem a good idea to me since many incidents are for generic issues such as password reset, etc. which aren't applicable to a CI and it forces them to create bogus CIs such as 'Password Reset' in the configuration item table.

So, I'm asking the community - should CI be a required field on the incident record?

Lars Kragh-Hans · ‎12-16-2019

I would say that Configuration item should not be mandatory in the incident record.

In case of an incident opened by a system user because it is triggered by a business rule (threshold breach etc.), it would make sense to make it conditionally mandatory. Requiring that those who build business rules also capture the configuration item gives the remediation team the best foundation for solving the incident with a low MTTR.

On the other hand, configuration items on incidents opened by human users should not be mandatory. Often a user will not know which configuration item is at fault and there is a risk of either the user or the service desk worker setting an incorrect configuration item. In case of human users, it is more important that the service desk worker tries to capture the symptoms experienced and what actions lead to these.

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William Busby · ‎01-29-2020

I get what you're saying but I think you're more focused on maturing the CMDB mgt and employment by using incidents. Most help desk people will tell you a significant percentage of calls are password issues or 'why is it doing that?' which have absolutely no tie-in to the CMDB. Why force the help desk to enter a dummy CI just because it's a required field. IMHO, we shouldn't be collecting data unless it's useful.