Incident Management is the process of dealing with all incidents. Incidents are unplanned occurrences which can disrupt a service or degrade the quality of a service. In the context of IT services, these can include service failures (application not working, hardware or connectivity failures etc.) which are reported by users or failures which are automatically detected by monitoring tools and an alarm generated. In both cases an incident record is created in SapphireIMS and acted upon by IT engineers to restore the service. For details on creating incidents from alarms automatically refer to the topic Settings->Faults and Notifications->Alarm to Record.
In the context of an Enterprise, an incident record is most commonly used to report a breakdown. For example, it could be a record to report non working of an air-conditioning equipment to Facility Management.
The work-flow to resolve an incident varies across organizations. While there is a pre-built process (using swhich conforms to ITIL standards, organizations can choose to customize the workflow. Workflows are defined by states which represent milestones in the progression of the work with the connectors representing the activity to achieve the next milestone. As the activity gets completed, the owner of the activity moves the state of the record to the next state. All workflows have a start and end state. States can transition to one of multiple states based on decisions taken by the owner. Similarly certain states are used to await an approval before further progress can happen.
When a record is submitted, it starts in an initial state (New). SapphireIMS can be configured such that the record is manually assigned to a person responsible for resolving the incident or automatically assign the record to the appropriate person based on workload or specialized knowledge needed or even the location of the submitter.
Typically there is an agreement between the business and IT for the service levels which include response and restoration times. SapphireIMS allows you to define multiple SLA based on the categories of incidents, the priority and urgency. The SLA can be monitored, measured and breaches reported.
SapphireIMS can automatically notify stakeholders (submitter of the record, owner taking action, other stakeholders) on any event on the record including state movement, SLA breaches etc. via E-mail or SMS.
Users configured as Project Admin for the project can create and make changes to the configuration. Refer to the section on Service Desk Settings for information on the configuration.