Skip to main content

Improved Validation of Configuration Items Field

Carlyn Manly

PCWhen a specialist updates the status of a request to ‘Completed’, 4me’s validation rules determine whether the specialist should link a configuration item to the request. These rules were already quite advanced, but have now been perfected even further. The objective of this enhancement is to ensure that when the Configuration items field becomes required, it requires at least one CI that is managed by the service provider that is responsible for the service instance that is related to the request.

In the past it was possible that a service desk analyst initially related an incident to the PC of the requester. After further investigation, it might have been determined that it was not the PC that was causing the issue, but the network. In such cases, the service instance of the request would be updated to the network of the requester’s building. That, in turn, could cause the request to be assigned to the network team of an external service provider.

Once a network specialist fixed the issue and set the status of the request to ‘Completed’, 4me would not prompt the specialist to specify which component of the network caused the issue. That was because the requester’s PC was already linked to the request.

Now the specialist will be prompted to update the Configuration items field, because the PC of the requester is not registered in the account of the external service provider and neither is this PC supported by a team of the external service provider.

Request with mandatory Configuration items field

This should improve the quality of the external provider’s reporting on incidents and the CIs that caused them.

Slightly simplified, the validation rule for the Configuration items field of requests can be summarized as follows:

Requires at least one configuration item which account, or support account, equals the account of the service instance when the category is ‘Incident’, at least one configuration item is linked to the service instance, and the completion reason is ‘Solved’, ‘Workaround’, ‘Conflict’ or ‘Unsolvable’.