Best way to calculate time from incident creation to being assigned to an individual?

[tajarichardson]

In my company's environment, incidents automatically get assigned to an assignment group. I am looking to calculate the time from an incident creation to being assigned to an individual.

I have looked through the OOB PA and Benchmark items and am not seeing anything that is capturing this. 

Has anyone tackled this issue? Or have any tips you'd be willing to share so I can create this metric?

[tajarichardson]

Looking at an incident record, it looks like the assigned_to update time is captured on the audit history, however I think this data gets purged/archived and am unsure how it would impact my PA and reports. 

[Dennis R]

If you're motivated enough, you could probably wonk up a metric to record this, but honestly, the easiest way by far to get the information you're looking for is arguably to create an SLA. This is commonly called a "response SLA," and there are a few sample out-of-the-box SLAs configured, you might want to check out this list:

https://instancename.service-now.com/contract_sla_list.do?sysparm_query=target%3Dresponse

If there aren't any that meet your needs immediately, just create a new one. Keep in mind that as a best practice, SLAs usually apply to the entire lifetime of an incident; that is, you'll have one response time entry per incident. If you want to measure one for each time an incident is transferred into a group's queue, you'll probably want to set up an OLA instead, which measures internal organizational level targets (for example, of an assignment group). Just make sure on the "Reset Condition" tab you have a reset condition such as "Assignment group changes" so that multiple OLAs will be created as a ticket is transferred from group to group.

For more general information, check out the documentation on the ServiceNow SLA engine:
https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/helsinki-it-service-management/page/product/service-level-managem...

Hope this helps,
--Dennis R