Customize the automatic closure of incidents

[kim_purcell]

To help ensure that your incidents move quickly from the resolved to closed state, Incident Management automatically closes incidents one day after they're resolved. Admins have the power to update the default settings and customize closure of incidents at their organization. Based on your company's needs, you can give as much time as your support team needs, or make it rigorous.

As long as absolutely no activity is performed on an incident, and no other updates have been made during the one-day time span, then the incident will close. If the record is updated in any way, then this closure gets bumped back a day based on the updated time stamp. However, if you need to make adjustments to this base-system functionality, there are several ways to customize this behavior. ServiceNow's Incident Management application allows you to modify everything from the days in which something is automatically closed to setting a specific user in the Updated by field, and changing the frequency of system checks.

Here are 5 customizations you can make to how incidents are automatically closed at your organization:

Turn auto-closure off:

1. Navigate to System Properties > System.
2. Go to Number of days (integer) after which Resolved incidents are automatically closed.
3. Set the value to 0.
   
   

Change number of days before closing the incident:

1. Navigate to System Properties > System.
2. Go to Number of days (integer) after which Resolved incidents are automatically closed.
3. Set the value to the number of days you want to wait before closing a resolved incident. For example, if you need a week, set the value to 7 days.
   
   
   

Changing the frequency the system checks resolved incidents to close:

1. Navigate to System Scheduler > Scheduled Jobs > Today's Scheduled Jobs.
2. Go to Autoclose Incidents. This job runs every hour, so if there are any new incidents that have gone past the one-day mark in the Resolved state in that last hour, these incidents are automatically updated.
3. Update the Repeat time to change this to run at a different frequency.
   
   
4. If there is a specific time of the day you want it to run, change the Trigger Type to Daily, and set a specific time.
   
   

Set a specific user as "Updated by" on incident record:

1. Navigate to System Scheduler > Scheduled Jobs > Today's Scheduled Jobs.
2. Go to Autoclose Incidents.
3. In Job content, add the following line above the scScriptName:
   fcRunAs=itil (the bold text must be a valid user_id)
   
   

You can set this to be any user in your system. This ensures all incidents closed are recorded as being updated by the ITIL user.

Incorporate other changes on the incident record at time of closure:

1. Navigate to System Definition > Business Rules.
2. Go to Incident autoclose.
3. Go to the Advanced section. This is where script field contains the code that runs on every incident closed using this feature.
4. Make additional changes as needed to the incident record.

For example, you can add a comment to the incident documenting the auto-closure. See the commented lines below for an example of adding info to the Comments field:

Looking for more tips for closing out incidents? See:

Tips and tricks when closing incidents

Auto close an Incident

Best Practice - Incident Resolution Workflow - ServiceNow Wiki

Closing Resolved Incidents Automatically - ServiceNow Wiki