Problem Management

The Problem Management scenario that is documented covers both hypothetical and real-world events, which helps you visualize how the functionality is put into practice and makes it more relatable and approachable.

This section comprises of the following use-case:

Problem Management for Frequent Network Outage   

Goal

Primary goal of the Problem Management module is to minimize the impact of incidents on IT services, improve service reliability and availability, and ultimately contribute to the organization's overall business objectives by ensuring a stable and resilient IT environment.

Scenario

NovaTech is a big organization that provides IT services to multiple customers. The company's IT department has been experiencing frequent network outages, causing disruptions to various business operations. These outages occur sporadically and impact different parts of the network each time.

The IT analyst Adam receives multiple incidents from the customers reporting network outage issues. He initiates an impact analysis and details the nature of the issue. All the service desk analysts are alerted, they immediately begin to troubleshoot the issue and implement temporary fixes or workarounds to restore services. Multiple incidents such as IM 01, IM 02, IM 03, IM 04, IM 05, etc. are raised for all the customers who have reported the outage. A P1 ticket is created as a parent incident which is linked to the problem record.

Now the Problem management team is informed about the network outage. They create a new problem record to track the issue and identify the underline root cause. Root cause analysis is done for the problem by collecting data values such as network configuration details, logs of the network device, etc. Based on the findings, a change request is raised to upgrade the network infrastructure to handle higher traffic volumes.

User Persona

Analyst

Solution 

Steps:

To achieve the goal, perform the following steps:

1. Login to Apex. Click Service Management. 
2. Navigate to Problem. Go to ‘Manage Problems.’
3. Create a New Problem Record. Enter all the mandatory details.
   Figure: Problem record
   
   
4.  Link a parent incident to the created PR. After the problem record is created, the approver has to approve the PR.
   Figure: Link incident
5.  The approved PR is then assigned to the analyst. 
6.  Attach the RCA and other details to the PR. 
   Figure: RCA analysis
   
   
7. To create a change record from the PR, navigate to Links tab and create a CR associated with the PR.
   Figure: Linked CR