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ServiceNow Major incident management

Nicole Knight

October 21, 2020 02:57

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Hi All,
I have been supplied a requirement to build in Xmatters\SN for group managers to receive an alert when a p1 is created that has a major incident state of proposed. The ServiceDesk manager that is on call should be able to accept the Major incident or reject it. 
Accept will change the major incident state to accepted and reject should change  the incident from a P1 to a P2 in ServiceNow.
I have been referred to this link which I have implemented but its not changing anything. 
https://github.com/xmatters/xm-labs-ServiceNow-Major-Incident-Enhancement#manually-update-servicenow-script-includes

I am very fresh to Xmatters and am not really sure where to start. Trying to find any type of doco that gives clear direction is not easy :( I have spent way to long digging through documentation to be no closer to a result.

Can anyone help with guidance or links to docos that will help me through the event management and the alert triggers

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4 comments

• 0
  
  Francois Groulx October 21, 2020 12:14

  Hi Nicole,

  Interesting question. I have seen some folks cook up a UI button in ServiceNow to issue a POST to xMatters as an action which would probably help take care of the notification scheme of things. The trick is what to do afterwards.

  It sounds like one response should issue a POST back to ServiceNow and change the priority to P2 or the the state to Accepted depending on the response provided. That could be an opportunity in Flow Designer and a custom step.

  As for documentation, we have this integration (which I would call our main one) which has some information about its business rules, script includes and lifecycle around the bottom 2/3 of the page:

  https://support.xmatters.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004327803-ServiceNow-integration-version-5-5-

  Our consulting team has helped with a number of customizations with ServiceNow to do different things out of the box so it would be really helpful if you can confirm whether you are using one of our integrations (either that GitHub one or the one I pointed out above) so we know your starting point.

  Happy Wednesday!

• 0
  
  Nicole Knight October 30, 2020 00:34

  Hi Francois,

  We have the SN plugin up and running already and the sms alerts are working to the On call user to assign the job to themselves etc. We are wanting the same event to trigger a message to the SD team leader to accept or reject the major incident.
  
  I have implemented the steps in the github reference but I am at a loss due to inexperience as to how to get this working within Xmatters.

  In xMatters I need to get something like the following working:
  If an event is received where the Major incident state is Proposed then send an email to the SD team leader that is on call. The message should have response for Accept major incident and reject major Incident. Once those accept or reject Reponses hit ServiceNow I can do what I need with them.

   

   

• 0
  
  Francois Groulx October 30, 2020 13:28

  Thanks Nicole,

  I'm thinking this could be something a subscription could help out with or Flow Designer could run another event in parallel depending on the need.

  So would the on-call user AND the team leader have to Accept/reject or would the on-call user have to "assign to me" the incident and the manager would have to accept/reject as a response? If responses are different that suggests two different forms and subscriptions would not fit the requirement here. Also would there have to be further action taken after that response is sent? I realize that has to go back to ServiceNow and all but would there be anything other than a worknote update needed from our side of things?

  Happy Friday!

• 0
  
  Travis DePuy October 30, 2020 14:59

  Hey Nicole,

     I like to think of the xMatters records in ServiceNow as an SDK. It looks like you've mastered the out of box stuff and are looking for more of a challenge :D 

  One thing to keep in mind is that the ServiceNow integration is designed and tightly coupled to the ServiceNow "workflow" in xMatters. So every incident will need to go through that workflow (and associated integration builder scripts) unless you build out a new set of items in xMatters. This is important because the IB scripts and form set up what response options are available and what happens when the on-call responders hit those response options. (For a quick video on this topic, see here.)

  So if you are ok using the existing message template and response options, then all we need to alter are the trigger criteria in that xMattersIncident script include. (Not sure if you saw it, but this is a good overview of the xMatters artifacts in SN).

  That github article is 2 years old, but it looks like the concepts are still valid. I think the major incident process is driven off the "major_incident_state" field, so this is still valid:

  isAcceptedMajorIncident : function(incidentRec){
    return (incidentRec.major_incident_state == 'accepted');
  },

  There are some helpful entries in the System Log that indicate why or why not something happened. After putting a major incident in the Accepted state, do you see anything helpful in the logs? This block in the xMattersIncident.isUpdateValid function is what ultimately gates sending the incident to xMatters:

        if (criteria.isAcceptedMajorIncident) {
          if (criteria.isPriorityUpgrade || !criteria.wasActive ||
            criteria.isSLAEscalation || criteria.isAssignment || !criteria.wasAcceptedMajorIncident || criteria.isSnowAssignment) {
            
            shouldRun = true;
            reason = '| CONDITION : met active |';
          }
        }	

  So you should see that "CONDITION : met active" in the System Log. You might add some more logging to that if block to help track down which field is not behaving. 

  If that doesn't work, post your xMattersConfig and xMattersIncident script includes and we can take a look. 

  Happy Friday! (It is Friday, right?)
      --- Travis