"You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it."
-Johnny Cash
It's a good feeling to close an incident successfully. It's like checking a difficult item off your to do list (I'm guilty of adding easy items just so I can have the satisfaction of crossing it off my to-do list). Nobody likes incidents, but it is rewarding to learn from an incident and, hopefully, prevent it from happening in the future. Here are a few tips and tricks to try when closing incidents.
Change the Automatic Incident Closure Duration
By default, a system property automatically closes incidents that have been in a State of Resolved for 1 day (24 hours). You can change the duration of the property. For example, if you change the property to 2 days, then 2 days after an incident is marked Resolved it is closed automatically. If the incident is updated, such as a comment being added, the 2 day clock is reset. To disable the feature, change the number to zero.
- Navigate to System Properties > System.
- Look for the property named Number of days (integer) after which Resolved incidents are automatically closed.
- Change the number.
Close Incidents Related to a Problem
After a problem is resolved, any incidents in the Related Incidents list on the problem record with a State of Awaiting Problem can be closed by right-clicking in the header bar of the problem record and selecting Close Incidents. You can customize this UI action.
- Navigate to System UI > UI Actions.
- Find the Close Incidents UI action located on the Problem table.
- Edit the script as necessary. For example, remove the line incident.addQuery("incident_state", 3); to close all incidents related to the problem no matter what their State.
Create a Knowledge Base Article Automatically When Closing An Incident
An efficient way to share information learned from an incident is to create a knowledge base article when closing the incident. Simply select the Knowledge option on the incident record (Closure Information tab). The following occurs:
- the incident short description is used as the knowledge article title
- the article is added to the knowledge base specified in the glide.knowman.task_kb property
- if the glide.knowman.submission.workflow property is set to true, a submission record is sent to users with the knowledge role for approval (after approval, the submission becomes a draft knowledge article)
There are some great discussions in the community about closing incidents:
- kunika_sharma wanted to know how to prevent incident state from changing to resolved unless associated change ticket is closed. Pradeep Sharma and Neeraj Gupta answered the call with some good business rule advice.
- Sonia Houle had a question about enabling the attachment icon on a closed incident form. solutioner now gave a helpful response.
- Hank Blair wanted to know if it was possible to send incident close notes to watch list members. Michael Ritchie had the answer and a provided a good example to follow.
ServiceNow offers more information about closing incidents in the product documentation:
