uControlSection — Incident Categories
Section — Incident Categories
What this section captures
Incident Categories are the catalogue of things that can go wrong for an end user — the symptoms and faults a help desk needs to recognise and route. Each row is a hierarchical classification (typically Category / Sub-category / Item, but you can add as many levels as you need) plus the metadata that drives ticket behaviour: SLA, Impact, Urgency, owning Group, and the Workflow the ticket follows.
Why it matters
Incidents are about half of most service-desk volume. The category a ticket lands in drives:
Which group queue it appears in.
What SLA clock starts running.
Which workflow steps the technician walks through.
What reporting bucket it counts in.
A poorly categorised catalogue means tickets end up in the wrong queue, dashboards under-count problem areas, and the AI features that depend on category metadata can’t do their job.
Per-tab prefix
At the top of the page there is a single text input labelled Incident category prefix. Whatever you type here is prepended to the Full Category of every row on this tab — this is where you put your organisational context that’s common to all incidents in the engagement.
Example: setting the prefix to IT / Corporate on a row whose own levels are Office 365 / Outlook / Cannot sign in produces a Full Category of:
IT / Corporate / Office 365 / Outlook / Cannot sign in
The prefix is a single value per engagement (separate from the Request prefix) and is editable only while the section is in Draft.
Variable-length category levels
When adding or editing a row you’ll see a Category levels panel with one input for each level. The first input is always Category; subsequent inputs are labelled Category (Level 1), Category (Level 2), and so on.
By default five levels are shown on new rows — ample for most ITSM schemes without over-prompting.
Click + Add level to append more levels if you need a deeper path.
Click the × next to any level (Level 1 onwards) to remove it.
Empty levels are dropped on save — you don’t need to clear unused inputs.
Different rows can have different depths. A simple row might use only the top-level Category; a deeply-nested symptom might use all five levels.
The Full Category preview at the bottom of the form updates live to show prefix + populated levels joined with / .
How to fill it in
Set the prefix if your engagement has one (e.g. IT / Corporate).
Click + Load defaults to seed common categories (hardware, software, access, network, email). Use this as a starting point you edit.
For each row, set:
Category levels — one to N entries describing the symptom hierarchy.
Code — the ticket code (e.g.
INC_EMAIL_NOT_RECEIVING).SLA — which service level applies.
Impact — default impact (the user can override on the ticket).
Urgency — default urgency.
Group — the group that owns this category by default.
Workflow — the main workflow the ticket follows.
Use the filter bar above the table to find rows quickly — the search box matches the Full Category and Code, and the dropdowns scope by SLA, Impact, Urgency, Group or Workflow.
Bulk-select rows and use Bulk apply to set a common Group or SLA across many rows at once.
Bulk template — XLSX download & upload
For engagements with hundreds of categories, hand-entry one row at a time is too slow. Two buttons at the top of the table support a spreadsheet round-trip:
↓ Template — downloads an XLSX with the right column shape and dropdowns pre-populated for SLA, Impact, Urgency, Group and Workflow (sourced from your engagement’s configured values on the other tabs). Five category-level columns, optional Code, plus the dropdown columns. Every cell defaults to blank — all fields are optional.
↑ Upload — opens a file picker. Pick your edited XLSX and rows are imported. Idempotent: any row whose levels match an existing row is skipped (counted as “duplicate”). Unknown SLA / Impact / Group / Workflow labels insert the row with that field left blank and a warning shown in the result banner. A summary banner reports Imported N row(s) — skipped X duplicate(s) — Y warning(s).
Tip: the dropdowns work even when the file is open in Excel for Mac — the values are embedded directly in each cell’s validation, not referenced from a hidden sheet, so Excel’s auto-complete cannot pollute them.
AI assistance
Three AI features are available on this page (when AI is enabled at the platform level):
✨ Suggest priorities (top of table) — classifies rows missing SLA / Impact / Urgency in one batched call. Respects row selection: if you tick rows before clicking the button, only those rows are processed; if no rows are ticked, every row missing one of the three is processed. The preview modal shows each row’s Full Category (including prefix) so you can sanity-check before applying.
✨ (per row) — same suggestion, but for just one row. Useful for late additions.
✨ Suggest items (next to + Add Row) — type a topic (“Intune”, “Microsoft 365 email”) and the AI returns ~10 candidate rows with everything filled in. Edit any cell before creating.
See AI Features in TekReady for the full walkthrough.
EasyVista integration
For tenants on EasyVista, an admin-only panel at the top of the page exposes the JSON pull URL that EasyVista’s Easy Connect connector consumes. See Integrations — EasyVista catalog sync for the full setup walkthrough (URL format, authentication, JSON schema, EV Easy Connect configuration steps).
Approval implications
This section follows the standard four-state approval lifecycle: Draft (editable) → Submitted (locked, awaiting the customer’s Manager) → Manager Approved (locked, awaiting the Partner approver) → Final (fully signed off and locked). A reviewer can reject the section back to Draft, with a reason, at either approval step.
This section often contains 100+ rows. Use the filter, bulk actions, prefix and template upload while in Draft. Once Final, the only way to add a new category is to reject the section back to Draft — consider whether the catalogue is realistically complete before locking it.