Periodic Maintenance Tasks

[nate_weldon1]

I'm wondering what others are doing for periodic maintenance tasks. I have a few specific ones that I wouldn't really clasify as an incident, request or change. Specifically we have to review our backup logs each day for the jobs executed the evening prior, and each quarter we review ERP changes and such. I've created a scheduled script that will create an Incident for these events but I'm not sure that is the best representation of this kind of work.

Has anyone done something similar or are trying to solve for the same issue? I'm guessing it should probably be a request, but would like to see what others are doing.

Thanks,

Nate Weldon

[Mark Stanger]

Hey Nate,

I always tell my clients to forget about the label of the table that you're putting the task into, and just put it in the place where the process fits most closely. You can add any label to any record and filter on that criteria to slice the information anyway you like. My experience is that even though this type of thing isn't really a true 'incident' per the itil classification, it really fits best in the incident table in ServiceNow rather than trying to force it into the request table (which really isn't a good place to do standalone tasks).

Mark

[cloudyrobert]

Hi Mark,

Would you offer the same recommendation now as in 2012? I'm running into requests of this nature quite a bit, ranging from things that might be classified as maintenance tasks (we aren't using field service management or facilities at present) to generic recurring or one-off work that just doesn't fit cleanly into the available classifications as I know them. We've talked about a scoped app inheriting from task to handle these more generic work tasks, but the licensing costs may prove prohibitive on that front.

Thanks!

Robert

[nate_weldon1]

Thanks Mark, that's what I think I'm going to stick with since I've got the script all tidied up and setting the proper values in the record anyway. I think I'll just add a source category of Monitoring since eventually there will be many other types of Incidents that fall under that anyway. ITIL won't always have the answer so I should just go with the path of least resistance.