How to configure notifications for assignment/re-assignment as well as action log and user comment updates for Incidents and Service Requests in SCSM

Babulal Ghule| Support Escalation Engineer

Hey there again! This is Babulal Ghule from the System Center team and today I wanted to walk you through the steps to configure the notification for assignment/re-assignment, action log/user comment updates for Incident/Service Request.

In System Center Service Manager 2010 (SCSM 2010) we used an xml based management pack to create notifications for action log/user input updates. Now with System Center 2012 Service Manager (SCSM 2012) we have new classes that we can use for notifications.

ref: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2010/08/30/notifying-the-affected-user-when-the-analyst-has-updated-the-action-log.aspx

In this article I will cover the following scenarios:

1. Notify the Analyst when a user adds comments from the portal for an Incident or Service Request.

2. Notify the End User when the Analyst updates the action log from the console for an Incident or Service Request.

If you are using the Exchange connector to process emails to create and update emails:

3. Notify the Analyst when an end user replies to email notifications with comments (or provides new information) for an incident or Service Request.

4. Notify an End User when analysts reply to emails requesting more information (reply to assigned to user notification or analyst notification which will be logged as Analyst comments on the Incident or Service Request)

5. We will modify assignment/re-assignment management pack to notify for assignment or re-assignment of a Service Request.

Step 1: Creating Notifications

For detailed steps on creating notifications in Service Manager, please refer this TechNet link:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh519719.aspx

We also have a very good blog post on creating Notification templates here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2009/09/28/creating-notification-templates-in-system-center-service-manager.aspx

Scenarios 1 and 3

First create the notification template:

Select the target class“Trouble Ticket Analyst Comments” (Click on Browse and Select All Basic classes). This contains the analyst comments for Incident and Service Request class.

If you are sending notification for incidents, to get the incident ID select ‘Has Analyst Comment ‘-> WorkItem –> ID:

If you are sending notification for Service Requests, to get the SR ID select ‘Work Item Has Comment Log‘-> WorkItem –> ID.

Using this same method you can get the Title and Status fields from the respective class as above.

To get the Assigned to user for Incident/Service Request:

To get the Analyst comments for the Incident/Service Request. (Note: This will only include recent comments):

Lastly, don’t forget to select“Send as HTML”:

Step 2: Creating the Notification workflow (subscription)

Select “When Object of selected class is created” and Target class as “Trouble Ticket Analyst Comments”:

Select the template that we created:

Add related Recipients. For Incident it looks like this:

For Service Request it looks like this:

At this point we are done creating a subscription for an action log update.

Scenarios 2 and 4

This is the same as scenarios 1 and 3 above, only here we create the notification subscription/template where the target class will be “Trouble Ticket User Comments”.

Scenario 5:

This blog post provides instructions on how to create the notification workflow for Incident assignment/re-assignment:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/archive/2009/12/15/custom-notification-workflow-on-incident-assignement-or-re-assignment.aspx

We will use that as a reference but we will modify it so that it will notify for Service Request assignment/re-assignment.

But first let’s understand how this Management Pack works. This MP has two main sections that we need to understand before we make our modification.

1. When to notify (criteria section)

<Rule ID="IncidentAssignmentChanges" Enabled="true" Target="SystemCenter!Microsoft.SystemCenter.SubscriptionWorkflowTarget" ConfirmDelivery="false" Remotable="true" Priority="Normal" DiscardLevel="100">
< Category>Discovery</Category>
< DataSources>
< DataSource ID="DS" TypeID="SystemCenter1!Microsoft.SystemCenter.CmdbInstanceSubscription.DataSourceModule">
< Subscription>
< RelationshipSubscription RelType="$MPElement[Name='WorkItem!System.WorkItemAssignedToUser']$" SourceType="$MPElement[Name='CoreIncident!System.WorkItem.Incident']$" TargetType="$MPElement[Name='System!System.Domain.User']$">
< AddRelationship>
< /AddRelationship>
< /RelationshipSubscription>

Our only change will be SourceType.

<Rule ID="ServiceRequestAssignmentChanges" Enabled="true" Target="SystemCenter!Microsoft.SystemCenter.SubscriptionWorkflowTarget" ConfirmDelivery="false" Remotable="true" Priority="Normal" DiscardLevel="100">
< Category>Discovery</Category>
< DataSources>
< DataSource ID="DS" TypeID="SystemCenter1!Microsoft.SystemCenter.CmdbInstanceSubscription.DataSourceModule">
< Subscription>
< RelationshipSubscription RelType="$MPElement[Name='WorkItem!System.WorkItemAssignedToUser']$" SourceType="$MPElement[Name='WorkItem_ServiceRequest!System.WorkItem.ServiceRequest']$" TargetType="$MPElement[Name='System!System.Domain.User']$">
< AddRelationship>
< /AddRelationship>
< /RelationshipSubscription>

2.Who to notify

This will decide who we send the notification to and is based on your requirements.

<WorkflowArrayParameter Name="UserAliasOrRelationships" Type="string">
< Item>$MPElement[Name='WorkItem!System.WorkItemAssignedToUser']$</Item></WorkflowArrayParameter>
< /WorkflowParameters>

Attached to this blog is a ZIP file that contains two MPs for use in all 5 scenarios.

Enjoy!

Babulal Ghule| Support Escalation Engineer | Microsoft GBS Management and Security Division

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