Merge incidents

[pavankum]

need to merge incidents, requirement is like we have to select the incidents to be merged and select option merge(need to add merge option in "Action on selected rows" ) so that tickets will be merged

[randrews]

I would think long and hard before merging incidents... most incidents are created with a user as the requested for or interested party. .. they have the record number and have a reasonable expectation to find that record in the system... not have it disappear when it is merged...

second you are losing the history   of the record when it was reported etc...

what i would do instead is create a parent child relationship between the records.. and then set a BR that will update all children with the relevant resolution information and close all children when a parent is closed.

[afranco]

Our previous incident system handled "merging" incidents, it did not un-merge very well though we did this less often. The main reason to merge, at least for us, is when a user sends in a new incident instead of replying to the old incident. Then a watcher sends in a new incident instead of updating the old incident.

Certainly you can continue to create parent/child relationships though if you can merge the incidents into the one parent as they still relate to the initial incident and are not separate issues, this would be the preferred method. The incident data that needs to be reported on is the initial incident.

At least in our use case.

[randrews]

you could create a related records glide list tied to the incident table on the incident form... and link them that way... you can then close any related incidents without affecting the original/master...

[barker]

Quite a few other incident management suites handle merging tickets elegantly, and as opposed to simply deleting the old record they link it to the ticket that was merged so it can still be referenced if needed.   Much different than child incidents, as the result is that you only have 1 incident open, with a combination of the history, ordered by date.

I guess the question is if ServiceNow is capable of programming to do this, sadly, I'm assuming not as well as other products that have this integrated by design.