Problem Management use case
Summarize
Summary of Problem Management use case
Problem Management in ServiceNow helps prevent problems and recurring incidents while minimizing the impact of incidents that cannot be avoided. It enables you to systematically capture and track information related to affected configuration items (CIs), especially assets, to maintain records of updates, repairs, swaps, or retirements. This tracking facilitates understanding asset locations, usage, and changes, supporting efficient asset monitoring and management within your organization.
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When a CI causes a problem, the dependency view helps identify other impacted CIs, allowing you to associate these affected items with the problem record and understand the broader impact through dependent relationships.
Key Features
- CMDB and CSDM integration: The Common Service Data Model (CSDM) framework enhances Problem Management by providing context on the impact of problems on services and offerings.
- Impact assessment: Dynamically route problems and identify one or more impacted services to effectively address issues.
- Service subscriptions: Utilize related lists on service offerings to identify who might be impacted by outages, including subscriptions by company, department, group, location, and user.
- Business and technical service offerings: Help determine business approvers and technical assignment groups based on attributes like approvalgroup, businesscriticality, and assignmentgroup.
- Application services: Differentiate between production and non-production environments (DEV, QA, UAT) for targeted problem management, using the environment attribute.
Key Outcomes
By leveraging the CSDM framework within Problem Management, you gain enhanced visibility and context around the CIs involved in problems. Practical steps include:
- Populating the Configuration Item attribute on the Problem form to specify the affected CI or service.
- Optionally using Service and Service Offering attributes to narrow down CI selections, which requires additional configuration beyond the base system.
- Using the Affected CI related list to identify other CIs potentially causing the problem.
This structured approach supports efficient root cause analysis and impact determination, enabling your teams to manage problems more effectively and reduce incident recurrence.
The Problem Management use case is described in this section.
Problem Management is used to prevent problems and the occurrence of resulting incidents. It also aims at eliminating recurring incidents and minimizing the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented. With Problem Management, you can capture information on affected configuration items (CIs), with type as asset, in a problem to keep a record of the updated, repaired, swapped, or retired configuration items. By keeping track of the assets, you can identify the location of the assets, their usage and when the assets were changed. Using Problem Management, you to monitor and manage the assets in your company using a systematic approach.
If a configuration item (CI) has resulted in a problem, use the dependency view to identify other configuration items (CIs) affected by the CI that caused the problem. You can then associate affected configuration items (CIs) with a problem record to find out how the problem affects other CIs with dependent relationships.
Key features of the Problem Management use case
- Understand the impact of the problem on services and service offerings.
- Dynamically route problems.
- Identify one or more impacted services to address the problem.
The CSDM data elements used in Problem Management are:
- Subscription: Related lists on service offerings that identify who has access to the offering and thus might be impacted in an outage. A problem can identify impact using the subscribed by tables. The related lists are as follows:
- Service Subscriptions by Company [service_subscribe_company]
- Service Subscriptions by Department [service_subscribe_department]
- Service Subscriptions by Group [service_subscribe_sys_user_grp]
- Service Subscriptions by Location [service_subscribe_location]
- Service Subscriptions by User [service_subscribe_sys_user]
- Business service offering might be used by problems to provide the business approver based on approval_group and business_criticality. A business service may have multiple offerings, each with a different criticality.
- Technical service offering might be used by problems to provide the technical approver approval_group and technical assignment group on the attribute assignment_group.
- Application service may be used to provide prod and non-prod (DEV, QA, UAT, etc.) environments. Non-prod environments may be filtered out if desired. The legacy used_for attribute maps to the
environment attribute. You should use the environment attribute.
Note:Some service offerings may identify the environment of the offering as well.
Results of the Problem Management use case
The CSDM framework provides Problem Management context for problems on what CIs may be involved.
- Populate the Configuration Item attribute on the Problem form, configuration_item, with the CI item or service affected.
- (Optional) Use the Service and Service Offering attributes on the Problem form to help narrow down the list of configuration items to choose from. This feature is not available with the base system and needs additional configuration.
- (Optional) Use the Affected CI related list to identify the CIs that may have caused the problem.