Opening and working a problem

Opening a problem

From	How
An incident	Open problem in its menu. The incident's units, service and category come along, and it is linked.
Several incidents at once	On the Incidents list, select them (point at the start of a row and tick the box that appears; a bar shows at the bottom) and pick Link to problem. Pick an existing problem, or New problem instead: it gets every selected incident linked, all their units, and the first one's service and category.
A post-incident review	Once an incident is resolved, its Review tab has a card The cause, for good with Open problem. The incident's cause and its timeline go along into the new problem.
The Problems page	New problem, for a cause found before any incident (a monitoring trend, a supplier advisory).

A setting, Ask for a problem on every major incident (off by default), shows a prompt on a major incident's review while no problem is linked; it never stops the incident from closing.

Cases and incidents can be linked to an existing problem; so can changes. An automation can link cases too: a condition Problem (is linked to, linked to any, linked to none) and an action Link to problem.

The problem page

Its header shows the impact: how many incidents and cases it has caused. The page has:

• the description;
• the root cause: Markdown, started from a template like 5 whys if you like, and a cause from your organization's list;
• the workaround: steps for agents, and text For customers that can go in a reply;
• the fix;
• tasks with assignees and due dates;
• the links;
• a timeline with notes (@name tells someone).

Anyone who can see it can watch it.

Insert timeline, while you edit What goes wrong on a problem with linked incidents, fills a ## Timeline section with the timelines of the linked incidents as one list, oldest first, with the times in UTC.

[!WARNING] Insert timeline replaces what the ## Timeline section held. Change the text as you like afterwards.

Reviews

Every open problem has a review date by priority; its owner is reminded. When it is past, the page says so.

Priority	Reviewed
P1	Weekly
P2	Every two weeks
P3	Monthly
P4	Every quarter

Mark reviewed (in More actions, or on the past-due callout) records that a review was held, on time or late, with an optional note. The next review date follows from the priority. A decision on the problem in a problem review meeting counts as a review held too.

Telling the requesters

Once a problem is resolved, a callout offers Tell the requesters of the open cases: one public reply on each open case linked to the problem or to its incidents, among those you may reply to. The text starts from the workaround's For customers text; change it as you like. The dialog says how many cases it goes to, and how many are skipped (resolved, closed, or not yours to reply to). The cases stay open for their agents.

[!IMPORTANT] It is never sent by itself. It needs problem.manage, or being the problem's owner; API tokens need cases:reply too.