Status changing itself to "Impacted"

[John C]

Morning,

I have just noticed that my status keeps changing itself to "Impacted" every now and then by itself, nobody is going in and changing this manually nor has a problem being logged. The only way I can tell it has changed is if an end user rings up asking what is impacted or if I log onto the service portal myself and see it, anyone any ideas of how this is happening, you can see via the logs it's happening quite frequently too. Thanks.

[John C]

Any chance of some assistance with this please? It's been nearly 24 hours and still no response!? My Instance keeps becoming Impacted by itself for some reason....

[Gerry]

@John C

Just for the sake of the community, please be aware that there is no specific SLA associated with requests/questions asked on the forum. We do have more formal support channels for questions/help/non-availability issues through https://hornbill.com/support 

In terms of the problem you are reporting, I am not entirely familiar with the inner workings of service availability but if its being changed without someone manually changing it, this has to be down to a misconfigured BPM or Automation.  I will ask someone who knows better than I to see if they can give you any guidance, I am not sure who is available though so please bear with me. 

Thanks,

Gerry

[Guest Ehsan]

Hi @John C,

Is it possible that the status of your Service is updated through a Hornbill Automation node in a Business Process? In the example below, I have a node in my Business Process to update the status of the Request's Service to impacted.

To determine whether this is indeed the case - Within the Service, click on Config tab and check which Workflow is assigned to your Request types. In the example below, the Workflow for Incidents against my Service use an OOTB example BPM. 

 

Once you've noted down the name of the Workflow, navigate to Business Processes Tile for the Service Manager App via the Admin Tool (https://admin.hornbill.com/[YOUR INSTANCE ID]/app/com.hornbill.servicemanager/workflow/bpm/) and look for the name of the Workflow. Open the Business Process and look for a Hornbill Automation as per my 1st screenshot.

 

In relation to responding to forum posts - Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. Unfortunately, there is no SLA in responding to forum posts but the Hornbill community do attend to forum posts as regularly as possible. I can see that your Organisation is subscribed to the Essential Success Plan (Free service). You can subscribe to one of our advanced Success Plans which give you direct access to our Support function as well as guarantee immediate attention to your enquiries. For more details, please have a look on the Wiki document below:

https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Success_Plans

Hope this helps.

Ehsan

 

[John C]

Hi Eshan,

I don't seem to be able to find that node, I've checked them all, do you know under the second screenshot if it would be under Classification or Fulfillment and Closure!?

Thanks

 

 

 

[Victor]

@John C - it is impossible to establish from the screenshot if you have such a node.. at best we can guess and say that there does not seem to be any such not in the "Classification" stage and possibly there is one in the "Fulfillment" stage... However, this is a business process that can be built in so many different ways using so many different nodes. All I can say now is perhaps use the "Download a Process Definition File" button to generate a process definition file then send us this file and we can have a look (https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Business_Process_Designer).

IMPORTANT: If you generate a BP definition file and post it into this thread, make sure your process does not contain any sensitive or personal data (passwords, names, email addresses) . Hornbill forums are public and general public have access to view the forum posts therefore only send us information that does not contain sensitive, confidential or personal data.

[John C]

Here you go @Victor

 

ei-service-request-process.bpm.txt

[Guest Ehsan]

@John C,

From what I can see, the Business Process that you had sent us does not update the status of a Service. We can look in the database to see which user performed the action.

You'll need the Id of your Service. This can be found in the URL, when you open your Service. In the example below, the Id of my Service is 1 - Which is located between the two slashes after "view" (i.e. /view/1/).

 

Now - Login to the Admin Tool (https://admin.hornbill.com/[YOUR INSTANCE ID]/settings/advanced) and enable security.database.allowSqlQueryOperation setting, as below. Refresh your browser.

You now need to access the Database Direct Tile - You can use the search option in the Admin Tool to find this Tile. Alternatively, navigate to https://admin.hornbill.com/[YOUR INSTANCE ID]/data/db/).

Type in the SQL statement as below within the designated box - PLEASE note that in my example, you'll need to replace 1 (in h_service_id = 1) with the Id of your Service in my 1st screenshot. Click on the blue (with an arrow icon) button to run the statement.

Within the results section, you should see a similar view to mine, as below. Notice that the User name contains the name of the person who performed the action.

Could you then speak to the person who has changed the status to Impacted (Where Status To is Impacted) and find out whether they had manually performed the action?

Hope this helps.

Ehsan

 

 

[John C]

Thank you @Ehsan, that worked a treat! Pity it doesn't show dates however...

[Guest Ehsan]

@John C,

To see the date when the status was changed, edit the SQL statement to include h_transition_date in the SELECT statement, as below:

SELECT h_status_from, h_status_to, h_transition_date, h_transition_by_id, h_transition_by_name FROM h_itsm_servicestatus_history WHERE h_service_id = 1

Once again please do remember to replace 1 (in h_service_id = 1) in the SQL statement with the Id of your Service.

Ehsan

[John C]

@Ehsan thanks again.

I am a little confused, the two users in question, Jogi and Saoirse do not have servicedesk admin roles assigned to them and could not have manually changed

Service Portfolio so how and why did it change both times to Impacted? Would it be because they were in the Portal and clicked on "Me too" or? That's me (j.connolly) manually changing it back both times....

Thanks

ADMIN EDIT: Screenshot removed as it contains personal data (email addresses)

 

[Victor]

@John C just a reminder to be more careful what information is presented when posting screenshots. I have removed the one above.

[Steven Boardman]

@John C if the users are part of a team which supports this service, they will have cut down rights onto the service if they

a) Click on the service name from the request column

b) Click on the service name from the details section of a request

This is covered under the Access section of the following wiki link: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Service_Details

But this would allow them to change the status, add FAQ's, Bulletins but not much else

Users on self service can't influence the status of the service via the 'Me Too' button

 

[John C]

That's great, thank you for all the info....

 

[Gerry]

@John C

Did you get the answer you needed? and have you found the cause of the issue you were reporting?

Thanks,

Gerry

[John C]

@Gerry

Yes, thank you, however I am a little disappointed that the analysts can actually do this via the ways Steven mentioned, surely the whole point of roles should be to actually lock down unnecessary access etc.

I was informed by Bob that removing Service desk admin role would make sure analysts could not make in my view "admin" changes to the Instance and I believe being able to change this is an issue. I also reported an issue last week on Bob's recommendation re once you do remove service desk admin role from an analyst they can't then change passwords for basic users, he said I should mention it here and they may create a new role for that purpose, again the below screenshot is what each of my analysts have as I was assured no "config" changes could be made to the instance....

Regards

[Guest Ehsan]

@John C,

You can lock down changes to a Service by changing it's access to Private. In the example below, I own a Service and I've updated it's access level.

Now I've logged in as a user who is granted the Services Manager role (i.e. can view Services list) but as you can see, apart from changing the Service's status, all other configuration options for the Service are locked.

 

[Gerry]

@John C

Thanks for the update, I am glad you have found the root cause of the issue.  You mention "surely the whole point of roles should be to actually lock down unnecessary access etc" yes, of course, but different people work in different ways and of course this sort of requirement can be subjective, I would bet at least one customer we have would not want to lock down being able to change the service status under these conditions. In any case the team will discuss the nuances of this behaviour and may be able to make some changes, our challenge would be any change like this could impact other users.

I appreciate Hornbill is a relatively new system for you, there will be some learning curve as you discover things like this, but I hope overall the solution still delivers good value for you. 

Gerry

[John C]

@Gerry thanks again, I bet if that one customer knew it was possible for an analyst without the servicedesk admin role to change it he/she wouldn't want it possible perhaps

 

 

 

[Gerry]

@John C

I think that depends on if changing the Service Status is considered an administrative function, I am not sure it is (at the moment) or should be, would be interested to see what other customers think. 

Gerry

[Aaron Summers]

Apologises for coming late to this post but I want to confirm that we are already aware and used this process of to change the status from normal to impacted and we would actually prefer it would not be locked down to role only.
It helps us greatly as well for customer to see that the service had become impacted, This would "sent the message" that something had happened to the service and we are working on the issue to fix it asap.

Aaron

[John C]

@Ehsan this has happened again, I cannot run that sql query now like before to see who made the change, what is my service id as in replacing the 1? I put in instance id but no joy...? service id different to my instance id yea?

 

[Victor]

@John C

1 hour ago, John C said:

service id different to my instance id yea?

Yea.

To find the ID for a specific service configured in your instance simply navigate to that service and then look in the URL. It should be something like this:

https://live.hornbill.com/<instance_name>/servicemanager/service/view/<service_id>/

<instance_name> is the name of your instance and <service_id> is the numerical ID of that service. It is this ID that can be used in the SQL SELECT statement.

[John C]

Thank you @Victor

Would you believe the service id is 1 anyway hence I was trying to change this, and didn't need to, thank you.

 

Regards

[Victor]

18 minutes ago, John C said:

Would you believe the service id is 1

I would really really like like to...