"You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it."

-Johnny Cash

It's a good feeling to close an incident successfully. It's like checking a difficult item off your to do list (I'm guilty of adding easy items just so I can have the satisfaction of crossing it off my to-do list). Nobody likes incidents, but it is rewarding to learn from an incident and, hopefully, prevent it from happening in the future. Here are a few tips and tricks to try when closing incidents.

Change the Automatic Incident Closure Duration

By default, a system property automatically closes incidents that have been in a State of Resolved for 1 day (24 hours). You can change the duration of the property. For example, if you change the property to 2 days, then 2 days after an incident is marked Resolved it is closed automatically. If the incident is updated, such as a comment being added, the 2 day clock is reset. To disable the feature, change the number to zero.

1. Navigate to System Properties > System.
2. Look for the property named Number of days (integer) after which Resolved incidents are automatically closed.
3. Change the number.

Close Incidents Related to a Problem

After a problem is resolved, any incidents in the Related Incidents list on the problem record with a State of Awaiting Problem can be closed by right-clicking in the header bar of the problem record and selecting Close Incidents. You can customize this UI action.

1. Navigate to System UI > UI Actions.
2. Find the Close Incidents UI action located on the Problem table.
   
3. Edit the script as necessary. For example, remove the line incident.addQuery("incident_state", 3); to close all incidents related to the problem no matter what their State.

Create a Knowledge Base Article Automatically When Closing An Incident

An efficient way to share information learned from an incident is to create a knowledge base article when closing the incident. Simply select the Knowledge option on the incident record (Closure Information tab). The following occurs:

• the incident short description is used as the knowledge article title
• the article is added to the knowledge base specified in the glide.knowman.task_kb property
• if the glide.knowman.submission.workflow property is set to true, a submission record is sent to users with the knowledge role for approval (after approval, the submission becomes a draft knowledge article)

There are some great discussions in the community about closing incidents:

ServiceNow offers more information about closing incidents in the product documentation: