in this video we're going to talk about cross fuses problem turn-key the very first thing that we're going to talk about is something we're not actually going to show on screen but something to make note of and it's something that all of our turn Keys do and that is security rules and a problem management turning key we have two security rules that we modify the first is we restrict reporting on the problem record in the problem table rather to only ITIL users and we restrict list editing to just the root cause field this is a good example of some of the changes that we make in our turn keys so we only allow those with the ITIL role to report on the table and we allow what we prevent users from making list edits to problem records instead enforce them going into the form view in order to make all of their changes speaking of the root cause field I do want to note that we do have a new field called root cause on the problem record the reason for this is because in problem management root cause analysis is really the whole purpose of working with problem records now because of that we've created this new root cause field to track specific root causes and allow for to more easily delineate between description close notes and the workaround these things are all very important but it's also very important to note what was the root cause and so this root cause field itself is a custom field now before we talk about our next feature I think it's important to take a moment and talk about what organizations use problem management for and some organizations problem management is used as a major incident management process in other words we have active incidents that we need to manage as one unit or rather have a separate record to manage active incidents the second model is to use problem management as a root cause analysis tool so for example we would use problem management after all the incidents have been closed after workarounds have all been you know disseminated throughout the organization and now we open up a problem record to investigate why we are seeing incidents take place in the first place so in the former methodology problem management is very very time sensitive and in the latter methodology problem management is really divorced from the incident management process it's more concerned with getting to the bottom of things then getting things solved quickly now our turnkey is designed really to accommodate both of those styles of problem management really because we don't do a whole lot from a process perspective with problem management unlike things like change management or incident management this problem record doesn't have a whole lot of process around it but for the sake of introduction let's go ahead and talk about what this would look like if we were to create a new problem record from say an incident record to do that I'm going to open up an incident say one two three four and I am going to right click on the top of this incident and choose create problem what this will do is it will transfer the configuration item the short description the assignment group and a couple of other things over to the problem record and it will link it back to the original incident so here we are we've got the problem record and by scrolling down to the bottom you can see that we already have a related list which means that this problem record has already been created so we don't have to save it per se it's already been saved to the database we will simply update from here on out so all right I'm going to go ahead and add a little more description and save this problem all right so now that we've got this problem all figured out I'm going to go ahead and put in a workaround so step one is do this now if I right click on the top there is an option for communicate workaround and what this does is it will take whatever the contents of the workaround field are and it will transfer them to all of the incidents associated to this problem record and it will transfer them to their work notes field out of box the system will actually put it in the additional comments field meaning that the workaround will go out to the end users automatically now this should scare you just a little bit because problem records aren't always done with the end user in mind sometimes we're going to put here and work around you know reset reset the server or restart a network switch or you know something like that that we don't necessarily want communicated in its raw form out to the end-user so by right by modifying this just slightly so that the workaround goes to the work notes section we don't go immediately to the end user instead we allow the people that are working on the incidents to decide should we communicate this out to the incidents end-users themselves so you can see that we've communicated this to one incident if we had more than one incident in here it would have communicated it out to all of them but I'm going to go back to my incident record and now if I scroll down into my activity here we go problem workaround step one do this so if I as the user as I of the ITIL user as the ITIL user of this incident record decide that this workaround is worth sharing with my end-users I can copy go ahead and toss it in the additional comments and now it's been comma sent out to the end-user so that's really what's going on there now let's talk about the crown jewel of the problem management turnkey and that is the trend watcher now trend Watchers are something that's very very special in that they proactively allow you to look for patterns in your tickets and this is completely custom to cross use it's not something that you're going to find out a box at all this isn't an enhancement this is new functionality so let's take a look at what they look like all right trend Watchers come in two varieties the first are conditions trend Watchers the second are trend filled trend Watchers we'll talk about both of these but I like to divide these up into problems that you know about and problems that you don't know about so let's talk first about problems that you know about and walk through that use-case first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to select a table that we're going to listen to the obvious culprit is the incident table I'll select incident and now that I've selected incident I can choose conditions type and I am going to let's let's say that I am creating a trend watcher for the email business service owner they want to know if ever there's a problem with the the emailed business service so I'm going to call this the email business service watcher now once we put in the email business once we put in the short description we have to define our conditions and these conditions let's go ahead and put it in as a configuration item is email and just like that I've defined the conditions that I'm listening for on this specific table the next thing I have to decide is how frequently and in what time period I care about listening for these conditions so I've got the lower bound and interval fields that help me define that so the lower bound is how many times it should happen so let's say I want it to happen two times and the interval is five this is number of minutes so if ever this happens two times in five minutes where the configuration item is email then we are going to do something in this case I've got to action there are two options of what I can do I can either create a record or queue an event if I choose to queue an event this means that I can essentially tie into any event I want in the system so this shared immediately that call to mind script actions email notifications all sorts of good stuff like that so really the sky's the limit when you're thinking about queueing in action but the more classic use case is we are going to create a record when that happens we choose again a target table and because we're talking about problem management I'm going to target the problem table the next I'm going to choose a template on the problem table look at that we happen to have an email issue template already defined so this is something that you'd need to do beforehand but in this case you can see that the template itself as soon as it loads well the template itself itself should have some information about configuration item of email is having a problem so email it's experiencing issues description and the assignment group is it's assigning it out to a specific group so with that I am off to the races and I have created a new trend watcher here that will listen for these conditions and it will create a problem record well one thing I forgot to do is I do want to link the records and I'm going to go ahead and link these through the problem field on the incident records so it'll fill in the problem record on the incident incident table okay so with that in mind I'm going to go back to my list of trend Watchers and you can see that I often use this example I'm going to so I'm going to go ahead and deactivate the other one that was in the list here so we just are using the one that we created a moment ago and I'm going to go ahead and try try this out so let's go into the incident table and I'm going to create a new incident it doesn't really much matter who it's requested for but it does matter is that the configuration item needs to be email right once that is in place I'm going to go ahead and submit that and then to trigger this this trend watcher I'm going to create one more incident again it doesn't much matter who it's for what matters is that we fulfill the conditions which is that the CMDB CI field needed to be emailed all right now once I've done this watch what happens at the top of my forum two incidents have been inserted matching the trend trend watcher record conditions in the last two minutes and problem X has been created so that's cool we'll go there in just a second but I want to point out that on the incident record note that the problem field has been filled in with the problem record just like that so I'm going to go into the problem record and you'll see that it's copied over the configuration item a short description from the template the description from the template the assignment group from the template and it is linked all of the incidents together so that's the first variety of trend watcher and that is really incidents their conditions or trends that you know about or you can set a condition the other type of trend watcher is one where you're trying to keep track of things that maybe you don't know what's going on you're just looking for trends in that case you can select trend field and you can select a field to listen to so again we could do configuration item but one of the one of the ones that I like to bring out is something say like assignment group let's say that a single assignment group has ten records assigned to it within two minutes right that's that's a lot for most groups except maybe high-volume service desks but if this was an engineering group or something like that that would be a problem and so we want to obviously set our low lower bound an interval high enough to avoid false positives but this is just an example of something you could listen to so if ever the same assignment group is selected ten times in two minutes then we are going to go ahead and take action on it now again we have the same options where we can create a record or we can queue an event that's all the same the same idea the classic use case though is really creating a problem record but really you can create any record you want in the system or you can link the records however you'd like and that really is how trend watch our works again you can listen for conditions which are things you anticipate going wrong or you can simply trend on a single field to see for to look for patterns in the system and that is cross fused trend watcher and with that that takes us to the end of the problem turnkey so again this is a shorter turnkey here but we've got some some good things in place around security we've got some tightening around email notifications I didn't mention that earlier but it is worth noting that we've tightened up our email notifications to only go out if certain conditions are met for unassigned versus assigned problems etc we are communicating workarounds to the work notes field instead of the comments field we are modifying or we've added the root cause field to the problem record and we have also created the entire trend Watchers set of functionality to allow you to proactively create problems and then take action on them