Buffy the Incident Slayer

In keeping with our Halloween series theme,

If you read my last article… I know what you’re thinking… “You were self-traumatized by a vampire costume when you were four, and your parents still let you watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer?”

Or…

And I may be dating myself here… but you might be saying, “Hey guy… that is not Buffy the Vampire Slayer… where is Sarah Michelle Gellar?” Well, I don't know what you did last summer (see what I did there?)… but Buffy is and always will be Kristy Swanson — later of Psych fame. I just realized, as of this writing, she was also in the vampire episode of Psych…

I digress… Let’s get into Incident Management and slay some incidents with our awesome heroine, Buffy the Incident Slayer!

Every night, Buffy faces the same thing: a swarm of vampires popping up faster than she can swing a stake. Sound familiar? In the world of ServiceNow, incidents can feel the same way — endless, relentless, multiplying while you sleep, and sucking the life out of you.

At first, Buffy tries brute force. She slays one, two, ten… but they keep coming. Eventually, she realizes what every great Service Desk hero learns — it’s not about slaying harder. It’s about slaying smarter.

Instead of chasing every ticket fang-first, start identifying patterns. Are multiple “vampires” coming from the same dark corner (like a recurring outage or misbehaving integration)? Time to find the nest. Connect your incidents to a problem record and track it to extinction.

Best Practices:
🩸 Use clear categorization and priority matrices to triage fast.
🩸 Set up automations or Virtual Agent to handle low-level, repeat offenders.
🩸 Link related incidents to one problem record to reveal root causes.

When Buffy finally learns that not every demon deserves a fight — some just need to be contained — she becomes unstoppable.

So, sharpen your SLAs, grab your data-driven stake, and remember: true heroes don’t live in chaos; they bring order to the night.

Put a Stake in It:
What’s the one recurring “incident vampire” in your instance you could use Incident Management and Problem Management to stake for good this week?