Helpdesk and Recurring Incidents

This procedure will outline the steps needed to create a recurring incident. Recurring incidents are helpful for many reasons; however, they can especially help with trying to satisfy audit control requirements.

For instance, you could set up a recurring incident for the network team to view VPN logs on a monthly or quarterly basis.

To begin, go to your Notification Server > Tasks > Helpdesk > Notification Policies. From this point, you can create the policy here or you can create a custom folder to keep things organized.

Once you determine the exact location of your policy, right click on the folder where it will be housed. Click New > Notification Policy.

Click to view.

You will now see the New Notification Policy screen.

Click to view.

Enter a name and description for this notification policy. A sample has been created below. For the source, select query.

Click to view.

Now, click on the create query link.

At this point, all we need is a SQL statement that will always evaluate as true. For this reason, click on the Edit SQL Directly and enter a simple query.

You can use the query below. Once you have entered the query, click Finish.

Click to view.

You should now be back at the New Notification Policy screen. Now that we have our true query, we are ready to select the schedule. You have the option of creating a custom schedule or using a pre-defined shared schedule. For the purposes of this document, we will use the Monthly schedule that is out of the box.

Click to view.

To create the incident(s), select 'New Incident Automated Action' as the Add action type and click Add.

Click to view.

Now fill in the information for the automated new incident action. The top portion of this screen is for descriptive purposes only.

The title will be the title of the incident.

The comment will be the comment of the incident.

Click to view.

Now scroll down and class the ticket the way it should be categorized. You may modify these at any time.

Click to view.

Should you want specific notify rules, select them here. Next, click OK.

Click to view.

At this time, you are taken back to the new notification policy screen. We are now ready to test the policy. Before you can run a test, you must enable the policy and click apply.

Click to view.

At this point, you can clone this policy to create additional policies or you could add additional incidents to this policy by simply adding another New Incident Automated Action.