K20 Lab2990 - Resolve Critical Issues Faster with Major Incident Management

[ChristinaMiller]

Leverage this Community page to leave any comments or questions regarding the content covered during Lab2990 - Resolve Critical Issues Faster with Major Incident Management.  

[Shelly Laubert]

Welcome!! Feel free to post questions!

[Tom85]

Thank you @Shelly Laubert! I'm logged into my LAB instance now, and have the GuideBook with 11 sections open in a separate tab. So, I'm ready to follow along or get started whenever our current Zoom meeting gets to that point to begin.

[Christine Willi]

Sheeba has assured us we will receive her deck. Will that be send via email to attendees or will there be another way to download it? Thanks!

[Tim Kulhavy]

The slides are in PDF form in the Guidebook in the Additional Resources section.

https://developer.servicenow.com/connect.do#!/event/knowledge2020/LAB2990/lab_LAB2990_additional_res...

Also, the content will be available from NowLearning following K20.

[Tim Kulhavy]

How is it going so far with your Labs?

[Piotr Sadowski1]

Hi, just FYI there is a small bug in point:

16.Open the Create Major Incident rule record.

it should be:

16.Open the Create Major Incident Candidate rule record.

because screenshot is from this rule

[Tim Kulhavy]

You are indeed correct good Sir, thank you for pointing this out!

[soumyamitra]

Thank you for reporting it. We will have it fixed.

Thanks

Soumya

[Community Alums]

Hi,

When Incident is proposed as major Incident, how can member from Major incident group Approve the proposal on Fulfiller Portal. Is there any module / notification appear on interface which will help incident manager to accept / reject the proposal.

Thanks!

[soumyamitra]

Is the Fulfiller Portal something created for your org? OOB you get notifications and can promote from the Incident form or Major Incident Work Bench via UI Actions. Similarly this is available on Mobile.

Thanks

Soumya

[Tom85]

I'm good, thanks! I was able to follow the Guidebook section "Appendix: Review and Enable Major Incident Plugins" and get my personal instance loaded with data to continue learning on my own.

Thanks to everyone that made this possible today! I love your work!

[swindgassen]

Small typo in guide, Peggy's last name Holh instead of Hohl

see attachments

[Sheeba_Sriniva1]

Thank you letting us know.

[Venkatasubraman]

Hi,

In the communication contact definition, after adding the recipient list , the users from the recipient list are being added to the "TO" field of the communication task in the workbench.

Is it possible to populate the recipient list users in "BCC" rather than in "TO"?

Regards,
Venkat

[Ulrich1]

It is mentioned that you can setup dynamic receipient lists. Is dynamic referring only to collect the receipient list at the time the communication will be sent for users having a specific role like Service Owner, or does it also allow only to address the service owners from the impacted services on the Incident to sent a targeted communication?

[Ulrich1]

What is the reason why the Major Incident group is set as the assignment group of the Incident if no coordination of the resolver groups is required, why shouldn't it stay as is? Major Incident Managers can still see those Incidents in their lists and are able to communicate. Is this mainly that the Major Incident Group can use On-Call Scheduling?

[Ulrich1]

In very large organizations there is often more than one group of users managing Major Incidents, because of the different departmental communication needs and knowledge of the corresponding area of responsibility. The responsibility could be for example based on either the resolver organization or for specific services. How can this concept fit here? Everything seems to be set up to have one Major Incident Managers group. If no on-call scheduling is in place this could, for example, mean that 80 Major Incident Managers get notified about one Major Incident Candidate, which can be quite annoying if there are many candidates.

[Sheeba_Sriniva1]

With the Dynamic recipient list, you can send targeted communications to the Service owners of the impacted Services. We look at the Impacted Services associated with the incident record and add owners of those services to the recipient list.

[soumyamitra]

OOB we populate this to the 'To' field. This is because Email Client requires 'To' field as a mandatory input. An enhancement is planned for future releases for 'BCC' support.

Customisation is possible today.

The 'To' list is returned by function CommunicationManagementUtilSNC._getContactsForEmail. This can be overriden in CommunicationManagementUtil script include to set a fixed no-reply email.

The BCC list can be added in the Email Client Template via Javascript using a similar logic. However, be aware MIM uses a different algorithm than the base Email client which makes adding list of email addresses in the 'To' field faster than the standard Email client way. So, performance considerations need to be taken up if we are dealing with a large list.

Other options of using DLs mapped to Groups and returning email associated to the Group can be used.

Thanks

Soumya

[soumyamitra]

It is scripted and can handle role as well as service owners of impacted services or any other requirement. Here is a screen-shot which explains how the script is defined.

commPlanSysId is the sys_id of the incident_alert (Incident Communication Plan) record

commPlanSourceId is the sys_id of the incident record

sourceTable is incident

needOnCallUsers is input which lets you look for on call users if it is a related case.

All these variables are injected automatically into the recipient list when used from Major Incident WB.

Thanks

Soumya

[soumyamitra]

In the Lab exercise Major Incident Manager is grabbing control and driving the resolution across groups. If your process is different, we can opt to not grab control.

Thanks

Soumya

[soumyamitra]

We could assign a MIM role to one of the members of the resolver group who has the knowledge to drive it across as an alternate process. The lab suggests a common process used by some organisations.

[Sheeba_Sriniva1]

You can create more than one assignment group for major incident managers, let's say based on Services. You can either implement a business logic or assignment rules to assign Major Incidents or Candidates to the right group based on the service impacted. This way, the notification will only be sent to the major incident manager who are supporting that service.

[ChristinaMiller]

Questions and answers from the Tuesday, May 5 session:

Q: For a major incident impacting multiple customers, is it possible to send a different e-mail to each of the customer contacts with a single email template that dynamically changes the name on each e-mail?
A: No, if the e-mail is sent from a Communication Plan, the content will be sent to all of the selected contacts. You could build notifications to fire off individually, but it will be a hit to performance.

Q: Does Notify integrate with MS Teams?
A: Not at this time, but there is an integration with Slack. We are working on integration capabilities with MS Teams, but we have not determined a date for availability.

Q: Does Notify integrate with Skype for Business?
A: As Skype for Business is being replaced by Microsoft Teams, our current focus is on that integration capability.

Q: Does a major incident always have to be a Priority 1?
A: The definition of a major incident varies from company to company, and there is not a technical limitation in ServiceNow.

Q: Can the Major Incident Workbench be customized?
A: The workbench supports limited customizations. Most visibility requirements can be done via ACLs.

Q: Are the affected services added via Service Mapping or through related items on the Service/CI record?
A: From related items.

[arielgritti]

Hello everyone

Was a great lab!

Thanks for all

Ariel

[Sheeba_Sriniva1]

Thank you Ariel

[ChristinaMiller]

Questions and answers from Wednesday's session:

Q: Is the Now Agent application used in this lab available in New York?

A: No, the Now Agent application is available with the Orlando release.
https://store.servicenow.com/sn_appstore_store.do#!/store/application/516562e3531233007bc2ddeeff7b12...

Q: Does Major Incident Management integrate with WebEx?

A: There is not an integration available to WebEx at this time.

Q: What release has the ability to integrate with Zoom?

A: The New York release, or newer.

Q: Do you need a plugin for the Major Incident Management capabilities?

A: Yes, it is called Incident Management - Major Incident Management. This lab also showcases On-Call and Notify, which are separate plugins.

Q: What do trigger rules do?

A: Trigger rules can automatically propose an incident to be a major incident. A major incident manager must still review and promote them to be a major incident.

[TramaineM]

Since MS Teams is in the Integration Hub, would it possible to utilize it with MIM instead of Notify, Twilio etc.? Seems like that may be a better option for my company instead of paying for another service like Twilio.

[TramaineM]

Nevermind, just saw it in the previous QA..bummer

[ChristinaMiller]

Questions and answers from the Thursday evening / Friday morning session:

Q: Does xMatters or Pager Duty work with Major Incident Management?

A: xMatters and PD have some parallel capabilities, and integrates with incident management, so it should integrate with MIM as well. However, we recommend managing everything within ServiceNow, as ServiceNow is able to provide similar, or the same, capabilities.

Q: Since MS Teams is available in the Integration Hub, would it possible to utilize it with MIM instead of using Notify, Twilio etc.?

A: MS Teams is available through Integration Hub, but there are currently gaps with the MS Teams flow that we are working to address with Microsoft to be able to integrate with Major Incident Management.  

Q: In the State Flow diagram, there is an arrow from MI State: Rejected to MI State: Accepted. Is this meant to imply that the Major Incident Manager has the control to change their mind about accepting an incident after it has been rejected?

A: Major Incident Managers can manually promote to major incident, post rejection, however it is not a scenario. Typically it flows as Propose > Promote or Propose > Reject. It could be proposed again due to change in the conditions and/or the MI manager may also decide to promote for other reasons.

Q: Is notify also part of MIM?

A: Notify is a platform feature and it is a separate plugin.

Q: Which mobile app do we use if we need to manage Cases, Work Orders & other ITSM related activities?

A: If it is IT related, use IT Service Management. If you’re managing external customer cases then Customer Service Management, which also includes Field Services Management,  then the Mobile Agent app is used for your fulfiller and Now Mobile is for the end users.

Q: We have tried to use the MIM workbench previously, but we were not able to customize it as needed. For example, we didn’t need or want some of the widgets that were not applicable to us. Is there a solution for this?

A: The workbench supports limited customizations and most visibility requirements can be done via ACLs. Additionally, a few lines of JS could be added on to major_incident_wb_summary_custom_content to manage that. The 'major_incident_wb_summary_custom_conten' is a UI macro.

Q: If MIM is part of ITSM, why can’t I find it in my company’s current instance?

A: It is part of ITSM, but it requires the Major Incident Management plugin to be activated.

Q: How much work is roughly involved to get the Now Agent application into the workable state presented for this lab?

A: This was out of the box, with just the required ITSM Mobile Agent plugin from the store enabled.

Q: Do the comms plan / on-call come with Major Incident Management?

A: Comm Plan comes via Task Communications Plugin and is automatically activated with the MIM plugin. On-Call is a separate plugin, which is automatically activated since Madrid. If your instance is upgrading from an older release, you will need to activate it manually.

[Snow consultan1]

how the alert card works in MIM workbench summary page?

is there any relation between Alert card and affected CIs?

If I add CI under affected CI and an active alert in em_alert table, will that show in Alert card?

Thanks