Using Flow Designer to Create a Customized Incident with Event Management

[Vinh Tran1]

In the London release of event management, ServiceNow introduced alert management and using the flow designer subflows to create incidents, knowledge articles, application launch, and remediation.  The feature is new to our customers and they often ask us to explain or show how to modify, create, or customize the OOB “Create Incident” subflows.  This blog will specifically focus on this topic and will show you how to copy and modify the OOB “Create Incident” subflow and customize the following:

1. Add an assignment group to the incident record base on the CI’s support group
2. Use if / then flow logic to check if the assignment group is empty and set a default value
3. Calling the subflow from the alert management rule

Copy and Modify “Create Incident” Subflow

1.     Navigate to Flow Designer-> subflows
2.     We provide an OOB “Create Incident” Subflow.  It is recommended to make a copy of the OOB subflow template instead of creating a new subflow from scratch.  To copy the subflow, follow these steps:

a.     Open the “Create Incident” subflow

b.     Expand the “more actions” and select copy subflow

c.     Give the new subflow a name and set application = “Global”

d.     Click “Copy”

e.     In the Subflows tab, you will see the flow is created with the Status = “Draft”

3.     Review and modify the new subflow as follow:

a.     Navigate to the subflows tab -> click to open your newly created subflow.  (example: Create Incident with Assignment Group)

b.     Scroll down to the “Create Task” step and click to open it.

c.     The default “create task” for the incident table will already be pre-populated with some field values.  In this example, I want to set the CI’s support group to the incident record’s “assignment group” field follow these steps.

i.     Click the “add field value” and select assignment group from the drop-down

ii.    Next, select the data pill picker and pick:  Subflow input -> alertGR -> Configuration Item -> support group

iii.   Click Done.  You can add other fields by repeating the above steps.  like "assigned to" and the result should look something like this screenshot.  

d.     Next, I add an “if” flow logic to check for an empty assignment group as follow.

i.     Set Condition Label = “assignment group is empty”

ii.    Set Condition 1 as shown in the screenshot by using the data pill picker

• • • You want to select “create task”
    • Select "Incident record"
    • Select assignment group
    • "is" and leave the field blank (blank = Null/Empty)
    • Click Done

The result should look like this

iii.   Next, under the if section, click the “+” icon

iv.   Select Action -> ServiceNow Core -> Update Record

v.    Use the drop-down or Data Pill Picker to fill in the form as below:

• • • Action = Update Record
    • Record = Incident Record
    • Table (incident table will automatically fill in)
    • Set Fields to Assignment Group = Technical Support

  

e.     Moving “if” flow logic to the step right after “Create Task”. 

When you add an action or flow logic to an existing subflow, it adds the step at the end of the subflow so you have to move it.  To do this, hold your left mouse button down and drag the "if flow logic" in between the “Create Task” and “Update [Alert] Record”, then release your left mouse button.

 The result should look like this

 

f.     Finally, Save, test, and publish the subflow

Calling the subflow from the Alert Management

1. Navigate to “Event Management” -> “Rules” -> “Alert Management”
2. Click on the “New” button to create a new Alert Management Rule
3. Fill in the name, order number, and check the active box
4. Click on the “Alert Filter” and set the following conditions:

a.  The rule is activated when: Alert matches filter
b.  Add an alert filter you like.  For example, Severity is one of: Warning, Minor, Major, Critical or something like screenshot below

5. Next – click on the “Actions” tab and double click in the “Subflow” field. (Make sure you are in the “Remediation Subflows” section on the form)
6. Enter the following information:

Subflow: Create Incident with assignment group (or whatever name you use)

7. Click “Submit”

Check Your Result

When an alert matches the alert management rule you just created you can expect the following result:

• If the alert’s CI has a support group, the assignment group field in the incident record will show the value.  In my example, the assignment group value is “application development”
• If the alert CI’s support group value is empty/null, the assignment group field is set to a default value = “Technical Support” that you configured in your if flow logic.

Conclusion

Being able to trigger flows to gather additional information and enhance the operations – such as automatically assign the incident to a specific team – can drastically reduce the MTTR (Mean Time To Repair).  In this case, we saw how we could use related information like “support group” in the platform to populate the assignment group attribute.  I hope this blog is helpful to help and your customers.