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Incidents and events

Philip Colmer
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I'm working on a new workflow and I'm trying to work out where to add the "Initiate Incident" step.

The "xMatters Create Event" step has a field "Incident ID" and the help text says:

"Adding the Incident ID connects the event to an incident, letting you update the event as the connected incident progresses (for example, you can terminate all related events when the incident is resolved)."

So, that would seem to suggest that the "Initiate Incident" step should come *before* the "Create Event" step, so that you can tie the Incident ID from one step to the next.

But then the "Initiate Incident" step also has an Incident ID field, and the help text there says:

"This can be used to look up whether an event with a matching incident ID already exists"

which actually prompts the question "How can I see if there are any existing incidents that are related to this event?"

There doesn't seem to be an incident-equivalent of the "Get Events" step.

 

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  • Christine Astle

    Ah, thank you for pointing that out. I think we might need to clarify the help text for the Initiate Incident "Incident ID" field.

    If you want an incident and an event to notify folks about the incident, yes, you're right -- the Create Event step should come after the Initiate Incident step, and you'd use the Incident ID output from the Initiate Incident step to tie it to the event. 

    The Incident ID input in the Initiate Incident step works in two ways:

    • You can populate this with a value from another system. This lets you have an incident ID in xMatters that matches the one in the other system 
    • It checks if an incident with that ID already exists (whether the ID is from an external source or xMatters) and only creates a new incident if it doesn't. For example, if the value at runtime is "Incident1234" and there is already an "Incident1234", no new incident is created. If you want to always create a new incident, leave this blank.

    As for your last question, it looks like you can use property name and property value in the Get Events step to get events associated with an incident. For my event, I used 'incidentID#en' as the property name (you can find this on the properties tab of the event), and 'INC-1' as the value to get and terminate an event associated with INC-1. I'm not sure if there are plans to add a specific lookup for incident ID to the Get Events step.

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