Create Relationships Between Incidents

You can link an infrastructure incident to one or more child incidents.

Only an infrastructure incident can be a parent incident. You can only link an incident to an incident that has no child incidents of itself. It is also not possible to select a Closed incident as a parent or child.

To make the current incident a parent to another existing incident, complete the following steps:

1. Navigate to Incident Management → All Incidents and open an incident that you want to be a parent incident.
2. Open the Related Records tab.
3. Click the magnifier icon next to the Child incidents field. The incident list will appear.
4. Select the necessary incidents from the list.
   • You can select more than one item; all of them will be children for the parent incident.
5. Click the Select items button at the top.
6. Click Save or Save and exit to apply the changes.

To make the current incident a child to another existing incident, complete the following steps:

1. Navigate to Incident Management → All Incidents and open an incident that you want to be a child incident.
2. Open the Related Records tab.
3. Click the magnifier icon next to the Parent incident field.
4. Select the incident you want to be the parent for the current incident.
5. Click Save or Save and exit to apply the changes.

Related Records for parent and child incidents

Type	Description
Level of dependency	The field is displayed on the form and automatically filled in when either the Parent Incident or the Child Incidents field is filled in. Possible values: Parent – one or more child incidents are related to the current incident. Child – a parent incident is specified for the current incident.
Parent incident	Specify the parent incident of the current incident. You can only specify an infrastructure incident that is not a child incident. The values of the State, Urgency, Priority, Impact, Assignment group, and Assigned user fields, as well as some related records completed in the parent incident are automatically passed to the corresponding fields in the child incident. These fields in the child incident become read-only. To disable the automatic population of the Assignment group and Assigned user child incident fields, deactivate the itsm.itsm_incident.map_assigned_group_and_user_to_children system property. The field is read-only if the Child incidents field is filled in.
Child incidents	Specify the child incidents of the current incident. The field is hidden from the form if the Parent incident field is filled in or if the current incident is not an infrastructure incident.
Child incident count	If the current incident has child incidents, the field is automatically filled in with their number.

You can also create a child incident by clicking New in the Child Incidents related list on the parent incident form. The Impact, Urgency, Priority, Assignment group, and Assigned user fields of the new incident are automatically populated with the values from the parent incident. You can disable the automatic population of the Assignment group and Assigned user fields by setting the value of the itsm.itsm_incident.map_assigned_group_and_user_to_children system property to false.

Passing of related record values from parent to child incidents

When changing the state of a parent incident, all child incidents are automatically moved into the same state. The State field of child incidents is read-only.

When a parent incident is moved into the Completed state and the record is saved, the values of the Closure Information section fields are automatically copied into the corresponding fields of the child incident.

The following fields of a child incident are filled in with the information from the parent incident and can only be edited by users with the admin role:

• Related Problems
• Solved by Changes
• Caused by Changes
• Related Articles
• Known Error

The fields are filled in automatically both in new and existing child incidents. If the corresponding fields change values in the parent incident, the fields in the child incident are updated accordingly. The new values from the parent incident fully overwrite the current values in the child incident.

If you change the Parent incident, the values of these fields in the child incident are overwritten with the values from the new parent incident.

If you clear the Parent Incident field, the aforementioned fields become empty and editable.

Also, when you comment on a parent incident, the comment you made is transferred into its child incidents in two ways, depending on the comment type:

• The comment in the Work notes field is copied from the parent incident into the relevant fields of all the child incidents.
• The comment in the Discussion field is copied from the parent incident into the relevant fields of all the child incidents. A comment announcing notification is sent to the incident caller.