Planned Maintenance

[ian_hpw]

In the service portal there is a widget out of the box that is Planned maintenance under the systems status tab.

I was expecting this to be linked to the change scheduled planned start date and the impacted service CI, but it appears that nothing shows up on the portal.

Can anyone tell us how the planned maintenance shows us the upcoming changes, if that is what it is supposed to do?

[Michael Ritchie]

Ian, as mentioned these widgets are based off the out of the box cmdb_ci_outage table - you may need to activate the Task-Outage Relationship (com.snc.task_outage) plugin in your instance if it is not activate.   What you highlighted in your screenshot is an outage from the past (2/13) meanwhile the Planned Maintenance widget above it looking out 5 days from now.   I created an outage record for Friday, 2/17 in my demo instance for the Apache Web Hosting app and when I refreshed the System Status, it appears:

By default the "Create Outage" UI action only shows up for incident and problem.   You can add it for change requests by editing the UI action called "Create Outage" and change the condition to:

current.getRecordClassName() == 'incident' || current.getRecordClassName() == 'problem' || current.getRecordClassName() == 'change_request'

There you can manually create the outage via UI action or you can create a business rule to automatically create then based off the change start and end dates.

Please mark this post helpful or the correct answer to your question so others can benefit.

[ian_hpw · Accepted solution]

Thanks I can see that works as you described in creating a planned outage out of incident or problem. So thanks for that.

However it really seems counter intuitive doesn't it. There is almost never a time that you will create a planned outage from an incident, because usually the incident is creating a current outage. There is also very rarely you create a planned outage out of Problem because in ITIL problem feeds into change gracefully because a work around is in place and change manages the fix of the root cause identified in Problem.

So I would suggest ServiceNow developers should move this trigger from Problem into the Change form so that intuitively the change users can associate a planned outage from change and the customers get that represented on the portal as designed here.

We will test out the code as suggested.

Thanks for the advice

[jonny27]

Hi Ian

I really agree with you here. Replying to endorse your comments around the ITIL feeds from incident to problem to change. Surely it's the change the causes the planned outage?

Also, what about planned maintenance that doesn't necessarily derive from incidents or problems?

I'll keep this tagged for any future SN updates

Thanks

Jonny

[ian_hpw]

Yes thanks for the endorsement,

yes planned maintenance is a form of change and should derive from the change record, this module/outage record give the customer a view of service interruption and planned maintenance from the FSC should be the same idea, a planned interruption with notice to the customer. I think if this is tied in a bit cleaner by spawning from the change record it could work well

[Teena Singh]

Ian,

The Customer Experience team is striving to ensure that customer queries posted from the HI Service Portal are answered in timely and accurate fashion.

If you feel the question has been answered, please mark the community discussion as answered. Also, if you found the response helpful please indicate that in the thread.

Thank you in advance.

Regards,

Teena Singh
Customer Experience: UX Strategy and Customer Insights
teena.singh@servicenow.com

ServiceNow