The goal of Incident Management is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible, while minimizing impact to business operations and ensuring quality is maintained.
ServiceNow Incident Management supports the incident management process in the following ways.
- Log incidents in the instance or by sending email.
- Classify incidents by impact and urgency to prioritize work.
- Assign to appropriate groups for quick resolution.
- Escalate as necessary for further investigation.
- Resolve the incident and notify the user who logged it.
- Use reports to monitor, track, and analyze service levels and improvement.
Any user can record an incident and track it through the entire incident life cycle until service has been restored and the issue has been resolved.
The following table provides a list of all the states that an incident can progress through.
Incident management state model flow
When an incident is Closed, you receive a notification stating the change. If you reply to the email with a subject containing Please reopen a new incident, an incident is created from the information of the original incident.
When an incident is Resolved, you receive a notification stating the change. If you reply to the email with a subject containing Please reopen a current incident, the incident is updated and moved back to a state of In Progress.
If you do not have any roles in the system (ESS) and you change the incident state to Resolved, you receive a notification with a Reopen incident link.
