Information integration techniques to automate incident management

Abstract

Service desks are used by customers to report IT issues in enterprise systems. Most of these service requests are resolved by level-1 persons (service desk attendants) by providing information/quick-fix solutions to customers. For each service request, level-1 personnel uses keyword search to see if the incoming incident is duplicate of any of historic incidents; otherwise, she creates an incident ticket and, with other related information, forwards it to incident's subject matter expert(SME). Incident management, responsible for managing the life cycle of all incidents, is the key to ensure availability of enterprise systems. Timely resolution of incoming incident is required to attain availability objectives. Currently, the incident management process is largely manual, error prone and time consuming. In this paper, we present a technique to correlate the incoming incident with configuration items (CIs) stored in Configuration management database (CMDB). Such a correlation can be used for correctly routing the incident to service personnel, incident investigation and root cause analysis. ©2008 IEEE.