what is Parent and Child incident

[Tejaswini9]

Hello guys,

What is parent and child incidets, why do we use it in servicenow and what is the relatioship between them, can anyone expalin me as i am new to this platform.

Thanks,

Tejaswini

[Utpal Dutta1]

Hey Tejaswini,

The parent and the child incidents are synchronized such that the state of a child incident changes depending on the state of the parent incident.

When an incident has a child incident, the following actions take place:

• If an ITIL user reopens the parent incident, then the parent incident as well as the child incident reopens. Both the parent and the child incident state is set to In Progress.
• If an ESS user reopens the parent incident, the parent incident state is set to In Progress but the child incident is not reopened.

You can use the Parent incident field to relate a child incident. Once a child incident is related, all work notes or comments from parent are copied over to the child incident. Also when the parent is resolved, the child incidents are also resolved. There are other few other states that are copied over, You can test it out in a developer instance and explore it further.

If my answer Helps then please mark my answer Correct and Helpful.

Thanks and Regards:

Utpal Dutta

[Harsh Vardhan · Accepted solution]

The parent-child relationship allows you to link multiple incidents that are related in a certain way.

For example, a network outage results in multiple similar incidents from different users. You can link these incidents under a parent incident. In this way, the activities that occur to the parent incident are automatically recorded under the Activities section in all child incidents and related Service Desk interactions (if there are any). In addition, you can also configure if the child incidents are automatically closed when the parent incident is closed.

[Tejaswini9]

Hello Harshavardhan,

The example that you have provided is great and i understood but i have one question, how to link multiple incidents as child incidents to one parent incident?

Thanks,

Bhavana

[Anurag Tripathi]

You can use the 'parent' field to link. Parent field comes form task table.