Service Manager 2012 R2: Incident Management

In a series of earlier posts by Peter De Tender, he covered the basic steps necessary for deploying and the initial configuration of Service Manager 2012 (Beta release). The steps introduced are still quite valid as we now focus on the Service Manager 2012 R2 release, with very little changes applied to the product over the last two cycles (SP1 and R2).

Service Manager 2012 R2 Steps

The key milestones covered in the original series included the following steps:
As we proceed, only part four will possibly need to be updated, depending on whether you have updated to Configuration Manager 2012. We will need to address some additional connectors; for example, establishing connectors with Operations Manager to connect our monitoring environment alerts, as well as distributed applications. However, of far more value, we will use our new knowledge of Orchestrator as we will leverage this tool to add automation for our support process, and make these runbooks available within Service Manager.

What Next?

Well, there is not a lot of point installing this product if we do not figure out how to use it right? Service Manager is an ITIL tool to help manage “tickets” logged by our users and permit us to track these tickets as they evolve through their life-cycle.
To bring Service Manager to life, the work we just completed installing the software and connecting to other various services is just the beginning. Over the next number of posts, we will proceed to configure Service Manager to begin customization on the key areas we’ll need to configure for basic ticking flows. Some of the aspects we will cover shall include:
  • Creating a custom management pack to host our configurations
  • Define some initial incident classifications
  • Enable e-mail notifications
  • Define support groups
  • Configure incident settings
  • Create an incident template
  • Create some queues
  • Create some views
  • Create some user roles

Getting Ready

Okay, lets take the opportunity to get your environment online. At a minimum you will need to have reviewed the following posts from Peter (links above) 1,2,3,5 and 6 (not 4). In the next post we will get started with the configuration.
My environment and any screen shots will be from Service Manager 2012 R2, but as mentioned earlier there is little change to these steps since the 2012 release.