Incident or Problem. Where should root cause / resolution details be documented.

[Lee Muirden]

So I am having difficulty in trying to define where we would document the root cause of an issue when it is discovered as part of the investigation into an incident.

The issue being that I want to be able to make sure we have a consistent approach to capturing this data that has to be fed back to our customers for the services we provide them.

I have two examples which are day to day issues we have and I'm interested to see what the forum thinks.

Scenario 1. We have a circuit go down. We inform the customer proactively and ask them to do their standard kit checks onsite. Before we are able to do any further tangible investigation into what is causing the issue and how to resolve it the service restores.

Scenario 2. We have a circuit go down. We inform the customer proactively and ask them to do their standard kit checks onsite. Customer confirms no issues and we investigate further and find that BT have a break in the fibre. Fibre is later fixed and service is restored.

Scenario 1 to me is a classic case of raising a Problem ticket to investigate the root cause. This may be just a case of doing initial checks and flagging it with a tail provider for them to acknowledge a fault on the line. We now have our root cause and this is documented under the Problem Process.

Scenario 2. We already have our root cause and we know its a permanent fix. Do we proceed to still document this under the Problem process or do we just feed this back via the incident.

What I want to avoid is capture root cause in two different processes within the Service Now ticketing system so I feel that even though it is an admin overhead we still need to follow the Problem process and capture what we already know in Scenario 2. This helps us report and feedback on customer issue within monthly and quarterly service reviews. It also means that potentially it is far easier for us to do further analysis on trends within this data as it is in one place.

I've been going around and around in circle on this one and within the business having to fight what is perceived as unnecessary admin overhead. So any feedback one way or the other would be appreciated.

[ServiceNow Tec2 · Accepted solution]

This has been resolved by ServiceNow Technical Support. Please refer to KB0819409 for more information.

[simonadams]

I don't think this solution makes sense?

Is the suggestion that all RCA's should be stored as Knowledge Articles?