Legacy Problem form

Release version: Yokohama

Updated January 30, 2025

2 minutes to read

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Summary of Legacy Problem form

The Legacy Problem form in ServiceNow's Yokohama release provides a structured way to capture and manage problem records. It includes key fields that help you define the problem’s scope, priority, and assignment, facilitating efficient problem resolution and communication within your IT support processes.

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Key Fields and Their Purpose

Business service: Specifies the business service impacted by the problem. Interactive icons allow you to view related active tasks and the service’s dependency map for better impact analysis.
Configuration item (CI): Identifies the specific CI affected, helping classify the problem type (e.g., hardware, network, database).
Change request: Links the problem to a related change request for tracking resolution progress.
Major problem: Checkbox to prioritize and flag problems needing urgent review.
Knowledge: Checkbox to automatically publish a knowledge article upon problem closure, supporting knowledge sharing.
State: Indicates the problem’s lifecycle stage such as Open, Pending Change, Known Error (with available workaround), and Closed/Resolved.
Impact and Urgency: Define the business effect and the acceptable delay for resolution, respectively, using High, Medium, or Low values.
Priority: A read-only field auto-calculated from Impact and Urgency to guide response urgency (Critical to Planning).
Assignment group and Assigned to: Determine the support group and individual responsible for the problem. Assignment groups are auto-populated based on the CI or service offering using predefined business rules, with options to override via custom properties. Role-based access controls restrict assignment to certain groups based on user roles.
Parent: Links to a parent task if applicable for hierarchical problem management.
Short description and Description: Provide a summary and detailed explanation of the problem.
Work notes list: Manages notifications for users tracking the problem. Users can add themselves to receive updates via the Add me icon.

Practical Benefits

Enables clear identification and classification of problems within your IT environment.
Supports prioritization and assignment workflows aligned with business impact and urgency.
Facilitates communication and collaboration through automated notifications and knowledge sharing.
Helps enforce security and role-based access controls during problem assignment to maintain governance.

Description of the field values for the legacy problem form.

Table 1. Problem form fields
Name	Definition
Business service	Business service that the problem applies to. If you select a business service as the configuration item and that business service is also listed as the configuration item in any other active task, the active tasks icon () appears. Click the icon to view the list of all the other active tasks that are affecting the business service. You can view the BSM map (dependency view) of the selected business service by clicking the dependency icon .
Configuration item	Configuration item (CI) that the problem applies to. The CI class of the selected configuration item identifies the type of problem, for example, hardware, network, or database.
Change request	Change request associated with the problem.
Major problem	Check box to prioritize a problem and highlight that it needs a review.
Knowledge	Check box to automatically submit a knowledge article when a problem is closed.
State	State of the problem: Open: Open and unassigned. Pending Change: Waiting for the corresponding change request to be closed. Known Error: This problem is not going to be fixed and there is a workaround. Users with the itil role have access to the Known Errors module. Closed/Resolved: The problem is fixed and closed.
Impact	Effect that the problem has on business. Select the appropriate impact level (High, Medium, or Low).
Urgency	Extent to which the problem resolution can bear delay. Select the appropriate urgency level (High, Medium, orLow).
Priority	How quickly the service desk should address the problem (Critical, High, Moderate, Low, or Planning). The Priority field is read-only and is set according to the Impact and Urgency values entered.
Assignment group	The group who will work on the incident. The business rule Populate Assignment Group based on CI/SO populates the Assignment group field based on the support group available for the configuration item (CI) or the Service offering consecutively. Note: The business rule is triggered when an incident is created or updated and when the Assignment group and the Assigned to field is empty. If you want to override the default value, you need to create new properties and provide the field in the property value that must be used to populate the Assignment group field. Create the properties in the following order of preference: com.snc.problem.ci_assignment_group.field_name: identifies which CI field populates the Assignment group field. com.snc.problem.service_offering_assignment_group.field_name: identifies which service offering field populates the Assignment group field. Note: The sys_user_group read ACL calls the SNCRoleUtil function. The function verifies whether the group that is reviewed contains either the admin role or security_admin role. The function allows the user to view the group only if the user has the same role. As a result, a user with the itil role cannot assign an incident to a group that has the admin role or security_admin role nor to any group whose parent has those role.
Assigned to	Specific user that the problem is assigned to. If an assignment rule applies, the problem is automatically assigned to the appropriate user or group.
Parent	The parent task for this problem.
Short description	Summary of the problem.
Description	Detailed description of the problem.
Work notes list	Users who receive notification when work notes are added to the problem. Click the Add me icon to add yourself to the work notes list for problems you are interested in monitoring.