TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Roadmap as of July, 2023
- Major Incident Ticket Creation
- On-Call Management for Major Incident Management
- Major Incidents wrt Problems & Change
- Stakeholder Communication
- The Collaborate Widget
- Email in Collaborate
- Collaboration via MS Teams
- Status Page
Roadmap as of July, 2023
NOTE: Roadmap items mentioned here are for guidance purposes only and are subject to changes based on evolving priorities.
Major Incident Ticket Creation
1. What actions do we need to take to start using Major Incident Management?
Answer: To elicit the right level of response for a major incident, you'll need to set up roles, permissions, SLAs and more. Learn more
2. If we're not seeing the MI module, how do we enable it?
Answer: The Major Incident Management module is available to all customers on Pro and Enterprise plans. If you are unable to see the 'Promote to major incident' button, you might be using a trial account or a sandbox. If you are an ESM account, it will be available only for IT workspaces.
3. Is it possible to restrict major incidents based on workspace?
Answer: Major incident ticket type is available only on the IT workspace.
4. How is the Major Incident Management module priced?
Answer: The Major Incident Management is available under the Pro and Enterprise plans at no additional cost.
5. Can you control which agents are able to promote Incidents to Major Incident Managements?
Answer: There is an agent permission to determine who gets to promote an incident to a major incident. This can be managed from Admin >> Roles. Learn more
6. Can you request to promote a ticket to a Major Incident?
Answer: If there's a use case with a requirement for this, please write to support@freshservice.com to raise a feature request.
7. How do we create a parent-child relationship between a major incident and other incidents?
Answer: From the major incident detail page, click on related incidents, add child tickets and bulk select from list of existing incidents that are suggested by the system. If you do not see the ticket in the suggested list, you can search from the existing tickets to associate them as child tickets or create new child tickets to the major incident.
8. Is there a way to automatically close the child tickets when a major incident is resolved?
Answer: You can create a workflow automator as follows : When a major incident is updated > Status is resolved > Set associated child tickets to resolved > Send email to requesters of child tickets
We are also working on bringing in the capability to do it from the ticket detail page to select and close the associated child tickets when the major incident is resolved.
9. Will resolving the major incident copy the resolution into the child tickets or reference it?
Answer: Currently, you can set up a workflow automator to resolve the child tickets when the parent MI ticket is resolved. We have also taken it up as an enhancement so that a user is able to set up this functionality from the ticket detail page without having to set up a workflow automator.
10. When you close a major incident ticket, does it send the closure notes to the requestors of the attached child tickets and close them as well?
Answer: You can set up a workflow automator to do so.
11. Are we able to control who can create a major incident ticket?
Answer: Only agents with the permission to ‘Create/ promote to major incident’ can create a major incident ticket. In an ESM account, all agents who have the role of IT Supervisor and IT Ops agent can perform this action. In a non ESM account, all agents who have the role of an Admin, Account Admin, IT Ops agent and SD supervisor can perform this action. Other than the default roles, you can create any custom role to enable the above mentioned permission.
12. We don't have a dedicated ‘Major Incident Response Team’ because a Major Incident might go to any number of teams, depending on what services are impacted (Network, Phones, Application Engineers, Email, Etc.) Do we need a specific team to be the default for all Major Incidents?
Answer: No. It is not required that you have a dedicated major incident response team. It can be assigned to any team as per your process.
13. Does the Major Incident process require that the services be defined or could still be done without?
Answer: If your major incident management process requires you to send out public communication or communication to a select set of stakeholders by posting about the service health on a status page, then you need to track and maintain the services within Freshservice and configure how they appear on the Status Page in order to do so. Other than that, it is not mandatory to maintain your services to raise, track or manage your major incidents in Freshservice.
14. Can I hide the Major incident button until we are ready to use it?
Answer: Only agents with the permission to ‘Create/ promote to major incident’ can create a major incident ticket. In an ESM account, all agents who have the role of IT Supervisor and IT Ops agent can perform this action. In a non ESM account, all agents who have the role of an Admin, Account Admin, IT Ops agent and SD supervisor can perform this action. On disabling the permission, the link won’t be visible. In an ESM account, you can disable this feature by clicking on Admin > choose IT workspace >Field Manager -> Type > disable major incident.
15. How do you trigger a workflow when an incident is promoted to a major incident?
Answer: You can create a ticket workflow automator with the event ‘Type is changed from Incident to Major Incident’ to trigger further actions.
16. If you demote a major incident, is the status page retroactively updated to show ‘Green’ for that period of time?
Answer: No. Demoting an incident will turn the major incident into a normal incident. This doesn’t reflect on the status page incident.
17. Are there any plans for being able to track post incident actions to ensure root cause investigations can be followed up via Freshservice? Currently we still have to use JIRA for our post incident review process.
Answer: You can track post incident actions using Problem Management and the New-Gen Project Management module in Freshservice. The latter can be accessed from the left nav. Learn more.
18. Do actions like communication and escalations get recorded into the Conversation history?
Answer: Every action taken on the ticket gets recorded in the Activities section.
19. Is the major incident form fully customizable, much like ticket forms?
Answer: You can customize it like any other ticket form using business rules and form fields. You can create major incident specific fields from Admin >> Field Manager.
20. Can you promote an incident to a Major Incident using automation or API ?
Answer: It is currently not possible. Please write in to support@freshservice.com with your specific use case and raise a feature request so that our efforts are aligned with your requirements.
21. Can you automate an incident to become a Major Incident with a workflow or does the escalation need to be manually made by an agent?
Answer: This is currently not possible. Please write in to support@freshservice.com with your specific use case and raise a feature request so that our efforts are aligned with your requirements.
22. Will major incidents be reportable (time tracking / tasks/ etc) in analytics?
Answer: This is on our product roadmap.
On-Call Management for Major Incident Management
1. How can anyone distinguish between a phone call from a Vishing scam?
Answer: In the on-call schedule, under Notifications > Phone / SMS tab, you can download a VCF file which contains all the numbers from which Freshservice contacts you. You can share it with your agents so that they know it when calls are received from Freshservice.
2. Is a phone number required for an on-call agent? Can we choose a different method of notification to on-call agents for major incidents?
Answer: It is not mandatory to notify your on-call agents via phone calls. You can also notify them via WhatsApp, SMS, MS teams, Slack, in-app notifications via the Freshservice mobile app, or email. But to contact them via calls or SMS, a phone number with a country code is mandatory. You can configure notifications on Slack by configuring an on-call schedule for the assigned agent group and by setting it up in the Notifications tab. Learn more
3. I see that you used a single team for major incident management. How would you approach this with multiple potential teams? Would this need a new team to be created, or can it piggyback on the existing on-call management schedules?
Answer: While you can assign an incident to a single agent group ( which may or may not have an on-call schedule associated), you can also loop in multiple on-call groups to work on the same ticket at once by clicking on 'Add Responder Groups' from the ticket page and picking from the list of existing on-call groups. Learn more
4. In case there is no on-call agent, then what happens?
Answer: Having agents on-call is a critical requirement of efficient major incident management. In case there is no on-call agent, the ticket will wait to be picked up as per round robin assignment. This will delay resolution and affect the business. To avoid such scenarios, it is strongly advised to create an on-call group that is notified as soon as a ticket is marked as a major incident.
5. Does the On-Call Management module, which facilitates automated telephone calls and notifications, require an additional subscription/license?
Answer: Automated calls via the On-Call Management module entail no additional cost. Learn more
6. I'd like to page some ‘Urgent’ tickets differently than a Major Incident.
Answer: Priority based escalation for tickets is already available via Notification Rules in On-Call Management.
Major Incidents wrt Problems & Change
1. Can you still associate Major Incidents to Problem or Change Records?
Answer: Yes, you can associate Major Incidents to Problems or Change Records.
2. Can you create a Problem ticket based on a Major Incident ticket to research the root cause after the incident is over?
Answer: You can create a problem record and associate it with a major incident both before and after the closure of the major incident. We are also working on the ability to create a post-incident report on closure of the major incident to keep a track of why the incident occurred and how it can be prevented in the future.
Stakeholder Communication
1. What are the best practices for communicating a major incident to different stakeholders involved?
Answer: Generally organizations have a process of communicating about major incidents to 3 different audience cohorts:
Impacted customers via public status page
Internal stakeholders via email
Subject matter experts via Microsoft Teams / Slack / Zoom
2. How to set up stakeholders and alert them to major incidents?
Answer: Stakeholders are usually business executives who would like to stay informed about incidents that could destabilize the business i.e. major incidents. Stakeholders can be kept updated via the email functionality available within the incident details page via the Collaborate widget or by posting about the service health to the status page. Learn more
The Collaborate Tab
1. How do we get the Collaborate tab?
Answer: The Collaborate tab can be accessed via the Admin tab. Once you integrate with the tools of your choice, these tools will be visible in the Collaborate widget on any incident detail page. Learn More
2. Is any license required for using the Collaborate widget?
Answer: The Collaborate widget is useful for bringing in your existing tools of collaboration on to the incident detail page. So, if you have a Zoom or MS Teams account, you could integrate it with Freshservice, and then use it from within Freshservice. There are no additional licenses required to use the Collaborate widget.
3. Is the Teams/Zoom/Slack integration automatic or does that require more configuration per application?
Answer: All you have to do is integrate your Microsoft Teams or Zoom account to Freshservice. Once the app is integrated, it is a one click action to spin up an invite or channel from the incident detail page. Slack integration powered by the Freshworks Neo platform is on our product roadmap.
4. When sending a communication, is Freshservice looking at the Global Address List in Outlook or using its records, or both?
Answer: We rely on the list of agents, requesters and agent groups tracked within Freshservice.
5. What kind of information is captured as part of the Zoom collaboration feature?
Answer: We capture information about when the Zoom Meeting started and when it ended. We also capture information about the people whom the invite was sent to from Freshservice. We do not capture information about who joined the call.
6. When creating communication entries, can we communicate to all users of a specific software, or does it have to be to only associated incidents or pre-defined groups?
Answer: You can share information and communicate with any agent, requester or agent group in Freshservice.
7. Is there an advantage to using the Collaborate feature vs doing a reply to the conversation and CC'ing the desired individuals?
Answer: For critical incidents, it is best to have a live collaboration instead of sending out emails and waiting for someone to take notice of it. By making use of the ability to create an MS Teams channel or post to an existing one, or create Zoom Meeting invites from the convenience of the Freshservice ticket detail page, agents can quickly kick start an interactive session and resolve issues quickly.
Email in Collaborate
1. Why don’t I see email as an option in the Collaborate widget?
Answer: Email in the Collaborate widget appears when an incident is promoted to a major incident, or if a new major incident is created. It is not visible otherwise on the incident detail page.
2. Will we have the ability to create email templates where selected placeholders/field values will be parsed to?
Answer: You can create canned responses in the admin section by inserting major incident fields as placeholders. These canned responses can be inserted and used as email templates when you send out major incident email communication.
3. Can you customize the email you send via HTML?
Answer: Currently we only support rich text editing of emails sent for major incidents.
4. What happens if a user replies to the email that is sent via the collaborate option?
Answer: These are treated as system generated emails and any responses sent to them will be discarded.
5. How do you email all end customers? In the beta we can only email Agents.
Answer: Currently you can notify agents, agent groups and requesters tracked in Freshservice. We are soon adding the capability to also notify requester groups and any email ID that you manually type in the notify field.
Collaboration via MS Teams
1. When will MS teams be available in Collaborate?
Answer: MS Teams will be available for integration in the Collaborate section from August 1, 2023 when it goes into public beta.
2. How many Microsoft Teams chats can be attached with a major incident ticket? Can you have more than one chat per major incident ticket?
Answer: You can create multiple chats per ticket. Currently we do not pose a limit on this.
3. Can you filter what items from the ticket are added to the Microsoft Teams chat?
Answer: Filtering items from the Teams chat to add to the ticket is not supported currently. If you require this functionality, please write to support@freshservice.com to raise a feature request.
4. When creating a Microsoft Teams war room, does the channel's chat data get synchronized back into Freshservice at any point to be documented/searched?
Answer: Currently this feature is unavailable, but is on the release timeline.
Status Page
1. Can we see the customer view of status page incident update?
Answer: You can open the incident in the status page to see the update that you posted to it.
2. What is the maximum number of days (ie. 90 days) that incidents are tracked on the status page?
Answer: We do not have a cap on the retention period. All incidents posted to the Status Page remain until deletion.
3. Does a Status Page require that specific Services are properly configured?
Answer: It is important to configure the services that you want to display on your status page first.
4. Where will the Public Status Page be ?
Answer: Once you configure the Status Page in the admin section, you can post about the incident to a public Status p\Page from right within the incident detail page. Learn more
5. Will the Status Page replace Freshstatus?
Answer: Freshstatus will be a part of Freshservice going forward and will be known as Status Page. You will be able to post about the health of the services from within Freshservice to the public Status Page.
6. Where do Customers see the update?
Answer: Updates added to the status page incidents can be viewed by clicking open the incident in the status page.
7. Does the Status Page auto refresh?
Answer: The Status Page gets updated based on the updates made from the incident detail page as an agent but it does not auto refresh. Subscribers to the page will be automatically notified when the status page services and incidents are updated.
