Documentation forSolarWinds Service Desk

Custom states

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Introduction

In SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) custom states help to convey the progress or status of an incident, service request, or change. You can expand the number of states available to you by creating states relevant to your organization in addition to using the out-of-the-box states provided by SWSD.

Benefits

  • Build custom states to help support your organization’s change management strategy and processes.
  • Create more transparency by providing:
    • More visibility into the changes affecting your organization
    • More detailed status reporting for your change stakeholders

For incident states, you can determine whether the custom states can be applied to SLA rules by checking the Apply SLA box, found to the right of each state.

States an incident goes through

Let’s review the path of various states an incident goes through from creation to resolved:

  1. All incidents created via email, Service Portal, Web, or API are by default defined as New.

  2. After someone is assigned to the incident, the state changes from New to Assigned.

    If an incident is placed in a queue, the state changes to Pending Assignment. See Queue management for more information.

  3. After an incident is marked as Resolved, a CSAT survey trigger is activated.

  4. An incident can automatically be changed to a Closed state if there is no correspondence over a specified period of time.

SLA rules apply regardless of the state of the incident.

Navigation

ITSM customers ESM customers
Settings > Global Settings > Custom States Service Provider > Settings > Global Settings > Custom States

Create a new custom state

  1. Navigate to Settings > Global Settings > Custom States.

  2. Click Add Custom State .

Custom States tabs

After navigating to Global Settings > Custom States, the Custom States screen displays. Tabs on that screen are Incidents, Changes, and Assets.

States highlighted in a grey bar are system fields that cannot be moved or removed. They can be renamed or reset to the default name, but not moved or removed because they are used by SWSD in system automations.

After selecting a tab, the list of states for that object type display. You can:

  • Click +Custom State to create a new state.
  • Click the ellipsis button to show archived states or show all.

  • Click Show archived to view the archived states that are still in use in your Incidents, Changes, or Assets.

  • Drag and drop states in white rows. You can’t drag and drop or archive the default states, but you can change their names to fit your needs.

  • Hover over the state with your mouse to reveal the Edit, Archive, Reset to default, and Drag and Drop options.

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