How to perform Incident trending in an effort to proactively identify problems?

[Bryce Johnson]

I'm looking for tips/suggestions on how others are performing incident trend analysis in an attempt to identify problems proactively vs reactively.

[bammar]

Ill give you multiple angles here. 

First- You need data - AKA you need to have your instance running for say at least a year and a month to start doing Seasonal trending so if you just start using ServiceNow you wont be able to trend yr or over yr.

However if  you do have say 3 years of data you can start to run reports and Notice that August and January are your busiest months for Incidents if your say a School or University- this will help you to Staff perhaps seasonal employees or restrict vacation days on these mths.

2nd - Rapidly emerging issues- You can make a report on a dashboard that Shows say incidents by category opened in last 4 hours- So if you see a a Spike in OUTLOOK issues - 30 issues in 4 hours and the Support Manager knows this is not normal then they can jump on this and it could be indicitive of a larger issue. 

Creating Parent Incidents or attaching Incidents to a Parent Problem- Suppose you have outage you track in a Problem- connecting all tickets that come in to that can help you review later and over time you can see how often outages occur and what their impacts are. 

Communication is key, if the Call center gets a call that a person says the main website is down, if it can be confirmed then they need to alert everyone quickly

You can only be so proactive especially with unplanned outages but if you start tracking patterns you can predict more effectively but you really need a store of data accumulating. You also need the fields and values in say Incident that you would want to track. If the field exist it can be reported on! good luck!