The [Duration] and [Business Duration] fields in the Incident, Task, Request, and Request Item tables are not getting populated or seem to have the incorrect value.

[avi0007]

 The [Duration] and [Business Duration] fields in the Incident, Task, Request, and Request Item tables are not getting populated or seem to have the incorrect value.  [Business Duration] showing value 0.

[Mwatkins]

Hi Avishek,

This is a very common topic on the community. As might be expected with such a common topic, the answer is not totally simple and there are differing opinions. The main goal of the duration and business duration fields are usually to enable reporting on Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

In my humble opinion, this is how I would rank different MTTR solutions:

#1 Performance Analytics

This is by far the most powerful option. You can get Performance Analytics for Incident Management   for free.

Context: The ABCs of Performance Analytics - Part 2 - part 2 of a very helpful 3 part discussion about using Performance Analytics to drive KPI's, including MTTR, backlog and many more.

Moneyball for Enterprise Service Management (ServiceNow) - Another discussion about how Performance Analytics enables deep insight into KPI's including MTTR.

#2 Metrics

This method uses Database views   to report against calculated Metrics (metric_definition, metric_instance)

how to generate MTTR report for resolved period of time - talks about how to use Metrics

Re: MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution) Reporting - Talks about how to use Incident Metric to report on MTTR

MTTR Report - Talks about how to use Incident Metric to report on MTTR

#3 Service level agreements

Each task SLA has business duration and duration fields. Hypothetically MTTR would be equivalent to business duration on an SLA that measures resolution. You can report against the task_sla table to find out how many SLAs are meeting their different targets, including separating them out by SLA type - such as those SLA's whose name starts with the work "Resolution".

Re: Mean Time to Resolve - Reporting - Discusses using SLA's to measure MTTR

#4 Manually implementing business duration and reporting on it

Business Duration on new table - talks about how Business Duration and Duration are actually calculated and how a scripted solution could enable them on new tables that extend task. Also discusses the option of reporting off SLA's. FWIW, my personal research seems to indicate that the Business Duration field was used as part of the old pre-2010 SLA engine (completely obsolete and not supported). Most customers no longer use this field. The Duration field is also left over from earlier versions of the product and there are better ways of getting the information that it provides.

Re: Business Duration vs. Duration - some details about how mark_closed and mark_resolved business rules work and the deprecated method calDateDiff that worked with Calendars (deprecated in favor of Schedules many years ago)

Re: Business_duration calculation confusion - Discusses some struggles to get Business Duration and Duration to work as expected.

[ViktoriaMikoova]

shame that the links no longer work. Do you know if there are some newer posts about using the business duration field in other task tables? 

I only found this KB so far: https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0780039

[avi0007]

When reviewing the incident and request support tables, we see a number of duration values…

Incidents

incident table

• <business_duration>
• <calendar_duration>

incident_sla table

• <taskslatable_business_duration>
• <taskslatable_duration>
• <taskslatable_pause_duration>
• <inc_business_duration/>
• <inc_calendar_duration/>

Request

sc_request table

• <business_duration>
• <calendar_duration>

sc_req_item table

• <business_duration>
• <calendar_duration>

sc_task

• <business_duration>
• <calendar_duration>

Can you please specify what each duration value means?