Responding to and Managing Multiple Incidents, Events and Problems in Bulk

There may be situations where you want to respond to multiple incidents in the same way. For example, you find that a cluster of incidents that are assigned to you are due to insufficient tablespace issues on several production databases. Your manager suggests that these tablespaces be transferred to a storage system being procured by another administrator. In this situation, you want to set all of the tablespace incidents to a customized resolution state "Waiting for Hardware." You also want to assign the incidents to the other administrator and add a comment to explain the scenario. In this situation, you want to update all of these incidents in bulk rather than individually.

To respond to incidents in bulk:

  1. Navigate to Incident Manager.

    From the Enterprise menu on the Enterprise Manager home page, select Monitoring, then select Incident Manager.

  2. Use a view to filter the list of incidents to the subset of incidents you want to work on. For example, you can use My Open Incidents and Problems view to see incidents and problems assigned to you. You can then sort the list by priority.
  3. Select the incidents to which you want to respond. You can select multiple incidents by holding down the Control key and selecting individual incidents or you can hold down the Shift key and select the first and last incidents to select a contiguous block of incidents.
  4. From the Action menu, choose the desired response action.

    • Acknowledge: Indicate that you have viewed the incidents. This option also stops any repeat notifications sent out for the incidents. This sets the Acknowledged flag to Yes and also makes you the owner of the incident

    • Manage: Allows you to perform a multi-action response to the incidents.

      • Acknowledge: If an incident is acknowledged, it will be implicitly assigned to the user who acknowledged it. When a user assigns an incident to himself, it is considered acknowledged. Once acknowledged, an incident cannot be unacknowledged. Acknowledgement also stops any repeat notifications for that incident

      • Assign to: Assign the incident(s) to the administrator who will take ownership of the incident.

      • Prioritization: The priority level of an incident can be set by selecting one of the out-of-the-box priority values: None, Urgent, Very High, High, Medium, Low

      • Incident Status: The resolution state for the incident can be set by selecting either Work in Progress or Resolved or to any custom status defined.

      • Escalation Level: Administrators can update incidents to set an escalation level: Level 1 through 5, in addition to the default value of None. An escalated issue can be de-escalated by setting the escalation to None. The appropriate Escalation Level depends on the IT procedures you have in place.

      • Comment: You can enter comments such as those you want to pass to the owner of the incident.

    • Suppress: Suppressing an incident stops corresponding notifications, and removes it from out-of-the-box views and default totals (such as those presented in the summary region). Suppression is typically performed when you want to defer action on the incident until a future time and in the meantime want to visually hide them from appearing in the console. Administrators can see suppressed incidents by explicitly searching for them such as performing a search on incidents where the search criteria includes the Suppressed search field

      Incidents can be suppressed until any of the following conditions are met:

      • Until the suppression is manually removed

      • Until specified date in the future

      • Until the severity state changes (incidents only)

      • Until it is closed

    • Clear: Administrators can clear incidents or problems manually. For incidents, this applies only to incidents containing incidents that can be manually cleared.

    • Add Comment: Users can add comments on incidents and events. Comments may be used for sharing information with other users or to provide tracking information on any actions being taken. Comments can be added even on closed issues.

      Note:

      The single action Acknowledge and Clear buttons are enabled for open incidents and can be used for multiple incident selection.

    If any of the above actions applies only to a subset of selected incidents (for example, if an administrator tries to acknowledge multiple incidents, of which some are already acknowledged), the action will be performed only where applicable. The administrator will be informed of the success or failure of the action. When an administrator selects any of these actions, a corresponding annotation is added to the incident for future reference.

  5. Click OK. Enterprise Manager displays a process summary and confirmation dialogs.
  6. Continue working with the incidents as required.