Incident Assignment Group from CI in ServiceNow
With Colin Christie
In this article, we will give an example of an Incident Assignment Group from CI in ServiceNow. Let's say we’ve sent an incident to ServiceNow. We will take a look at how our flow will run.
Incident to Reboot a Windows Server
Our new incident just came in, and it's an incident to reboot a Windows server; it has a configuration item populated which is good. We can also see that the assignment group of the incident got set to the Windows Server Support group. Shown here is the support groupset to Windows Server Support on that CI (reference video at 0:40). Here's an example of how our flow was able to pull the support group directly off a CI and set it on an incident. This is a big benefit for anyone who has populated their CMDB and gone a step further to make sure that they have the proper data populated on their CIs to make sure that everything is going to be set up to go to the right support team.
Incident For Database That Has Gone Down
For this example, we'll show another incident coming to ServiceNow for a database that has gone down. We also have a configuration item populated here, and we can see that the assignment group is set to the Database assignment group. Shown here is the support group set to Database on that CI (reference video at 1:50). Now we’ve demonstrated two different support groups going to two different incidents, using the single flow that we've set up. people might think this could be done very easily with assignment rules. This is true; however, assignment rules depend on users opening tickets properly. For example, say the user who opened this ticket accidentally picked hardware as the category. If you have assignment rules that depend on the category being set properly, then the assignment group on an incident like this would highly depend on the category being set properly.
Let’s say that same incident was opened with a category instead of the category. Under different circumstances, that might go to a different assignment group and cause a delay in this incident being addressed; however, since we can utilize the support group directly from the configuration item, we can set the proper assignment group even if the user picks the wrong category for the incident. By utilizing Flow Designer’s low code solutions, we can very easily set up a rule in a few minutes that will help route incidents to the proper teams and get them resolved and addressed more quickly.
Automation Through Flow Designer
Let's see how our flow will handle new incidents that come into ServiceNow. We've just received a new incident for a Windows server that needs to be rebooted. The configuration item was populated, and as we can see in the CMDB, the support group is set to the Windows Server Support team — that's exactly what we can see on the assignment group for the incident. Now let's see what will happen if another kind of incident comes in. we've got a new incident for a database that has gone down, and the configuration item is also populated. Looking in the CMDB, we can see that the support group is populated as the Database support group, and again that's what we see for the assignment group on the incident. This is showing how the same flow can set two different assignment groups on two different incidents by utilizing that dynamic step we have in our flow that is pulling from the support group on the configuration item.
Lastly, let's see if that same incident came in for the Database server, but say the user who submitted accidentally picked the Hardware category. Now if we were relying on the more static type of rules that is parsing category to determine the assignment group, this incident may have been sent to the wrong group, which can slow down the amount of time it will take to resolve the issue. Relying on a well-built CMDB and automation through Flow Designer allows us to handle routing incidents correctly to the proper team and get them resolved more quickly. That's going to help us keep the business running smoothly.
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