Manage request associations

Learn how to link service requests, incidents, problems and changes using request associations to track dependencies.

Request associations allow you to link related service requests, incidents, problems, and changes to establish meaningful relationships. This helps you track dependencies, root causes, and related work across your service management workflow, such as linking a VPN outage incident to a firewall update change.

Understand relationship types

You can connect entities like service requests, incidents, problems, and changes using specific relationship types. These relationships are bidirectional and can span across different workspaces and request types.

You can link as many entities to a request as you need — there is no limit on the number of mappings. However, every child entity can have only one parent.

Relates to: Connect related items that don't fit other categories.
Parent of: Create hierarchical relationships where the current entity is the parent.
Child of: Link an entity to its parent.
Causes: Track causal relationships, such as a change causing an incident.
Caused by: Track reverse causal relationships, such as a problem caused by a specific change.

Usecases

When an incident leads to an overarching problem that necessitates a change, all of these entities can be linked (and kept track of) through the request association.
An onboarding request often requires keeping track of multiple work items. IT teams can link all of these work items to the parent request through request associations.

Link existing entities

Follow these steps to connect existing service requests, incidents, problems, and changes.

Navigate to the Associations tab.
Click the Link icon in the toolbar.
Search for the entity you want to link. By default, the "Relates to" relationship is chosen but you can change it by clicking on the dropdown menu.
Select one or more entities and click Add.

You can view all linked entities directly from the request details.

Create and link new entities

If the related entity does not exist yet, you can create it directly from the associations tab.

Navigate to the Associations tab.
Click the Plus icon in the toolbar.
Select the type of entity to create and the association type.
Fill in the required fields for the new entity and save.

Manage associations

You can easily search, unlink, or perform bulk actions on your associated entities.

Search linked items: Use the search bar in the Associations toolbar to quickly find specific linked items across all relationship types.
Unlink an entity: Hover over any linked entity in the list, click the Unlink icon, and confirm the action.
Perform bulk actions: Select the checkboxes next to multiple entities, then choose to Unlink or Delete them from the bulk action bar at the bottom.

Important notes

You can view all linked entities of a request from the request list page.
You can filter requests using its linked entities on the request list page.

Understand relationship types

You can link as many entities to a request as you need — there is no limit on the number of mappings. However, every child entity can have only one parent.

Relates to: Connect related items that don't fit other categories.

Parent of: Create hierarchical relationships where the current entity is the parent.

Child of: Link an entity to its parent.

Causes: Track causal relationships, such as a change causing an incident.

Caused by: Track reverse causal relationships, such as a problem caused by a specific change.

Usecases

When an incident leads to an overarching problem that necessitates a change, all of these entities can be linked (and kept track of) through the request association.

An onboarding request often requires keeping track of multiple work items. IT teams can link all of these work items to the parent request through request associations.

Link existing entities

Follow these steps to connect existing service requests, incidents, problems, and changes.

Navigate to the Associations tab.

Click the Link icon in the toolbar.

Search for the entity you want to link. By default, the "Relates to" relationship is chosen but you can change it by clicking on the dropdown menu.

Select one or more entities and click Add.

You can view all linked entities directly from the request details.

Manage associations

You can easily search, unlink, or perform bulk actions on your associated entities.

Search linked items: Use the search bar in the Associations toolbar to quickly find specific linked items across all relationship types.

Unlink an entity: Hover over any linked entity in the list, click the Unlink icon, and confirm the action.

Perform bulk actions: Select the checkboxes next to multiple entities, then choose to Unlink or Delete them from the bulk action bar at the bottom.

Important notes

You can view all linked entities of a request from the request list page.

You can filter requests using its linked entities on the request list page.