Is there a way to merge Incidents?

[blevin7000]

My client often gets multiple reports of the same Incident through phone, email, chat etc. Does anyone know of a way to easily merge the information from one Incident to another (for instance the client is looking for a simple solution like: Field "Merge with Incident" ___________) Has this been done?

Also, customers often email Service Desk technicians with follow up information, and they then want to forward it to their primary ticket and have this information integrated into the ticket. I realize this is different than the first scenario, but both involve the merging of Incidents.

Any suggestions would be very welcome. Thanks in advance!

[Mike Allen · Accepted solution]

I would use parent-child relationships for this.   That way, customers could keep their ticket numbers and you could write stuff to filter it all up to one parent record.

[Brad Tilton]

I've done some work around merging incidents in the past where we copy all of the data from one incident to the other and then closed the first one with the close code merged. Any updates to the incident get copied to the parent.

I do this Mike's suggestion of using the built in parent-child relationships would be a lot easier and possibly accomplish what you're looking to do.

[timothy_duffiel]

I have the exact same request on my side also. The Parent and Child incident is already in use, but as we also use Monitoring application that send notification to our instance and de facto create an incident for each, we often end up with many opened tickets which kind of pollutes our DB...

I'm also expecting to get a "simple" script that will allow us to tick the incidents we want to merge together from the Incident List, and then from the "Actions on selected row" on the bottom of the list, merge them together.

Actions that could occure behind will of course depend of what we want to keep from "merged" incidents and where we want to move these information's to in the "master" ticket.

[mollyclark7]

For this specific issue, I'd recommend looking at Event Management, which is designed to tie in with existing monitoring solutions and intelligently correlate related events.