Any thoughts about this oil filter?

A company I recently started with I am working with the ServiceNow team to implement a few things. One thing I was brought into was the company switching all their locations from one ISP to another. In doing so, we want to use eBonding between each other. The current ISP our eBonding I am told is setup that our ServiceNow connects to theirs based on the Category that is selected, so they named one the name of the vendor.

I don't like that, it should at least be "Network", not the name of the ISP. The new ISP the team wants to use the new ISP name. Again, I don't like it for several reasons.

The push back I received is that the configuration with the current ISP is configured to that category name so if they now go with say just "Network" for the new ISP, it will take a lot of work to make this work correctly. I don't recall exactly but it was explained that we basically are eBonding based on the category name and if we use just "Network" it won't know to go to ISP 1 or ISP 2, or perhaps not to an ISP if it is on our end. We will have both ISPs for a period while we transition off of the old.

To me it sounds like they set this up incorrectly. With eBonding, how does ServiceNow know where to send and communicate with?

Working at a new company to help implement ITIL and major incident management. Every place I have worked at has handled it a little differently but typically if an incident is a Sev 1, it stays a Sev 1 unless it was accidently or learned the impact was not that critical. Where I am at now, we can often have locations go offline which would be critical, so a Sev 1 is created. However, once business hours at that location ends, what do we do with the Severity of the ticket because technically there is no business impact outside of business hours?

Looking for advice from people actually in the industry.

My wife recently went through the licensing pipeline tied to American Income Life — took the class, passed the Texas state exam, and she’s currently shadowing before she’s cleared to sell on her own. Her family has done well with AIL, which is what got her into it, but they are distant relatives who live in another state.

The more I read, though, the less comfortable I am. It’s 100% commission, and the reviews paint a pretty consistent picture: no training pay, charge-backs starting from the first sale, and recycled leads handed to several agents at once. There’s no indication she’d personally be required to recruit anyone — but I keep seeing others say that recruiting people under you is how you really end up getting paid. That’s not what we signed up for.

To be clear, I get that money can be made here and we’re not expecting a fortune. But we went in believing she’d at least be earning a few bucks fairly quickly, and that’s looking a lot less realistic than we thought.

I don’t want her hard-earned license to go to waste, so I’m trying to figure out where else it can take her.

Her situation:
• Licensed in Texas (Life & Health — the line AIL had her get)
• Central Texas (Austin metro), open to remote
• Would strongly prefer something with a base salary or hourly, not pure 100% commission

What I’m trying to figure out:

1. What roles actually use an L&H license without the AIL-style commission grind? Carrier inside sales, health/Medicare telesales, agency team member positions?
2. For anyone who’s left AIL or a similar shop — where did you land, and would you do it again?

Appreciate any honest takes, including “here’s what nobody told us.” Trying to make a smart move with the credential she already worked for.

Edit: also we are out of central Texas, and she primarily speak Spanish, very little English, so she is limited to what work or where she could take this elsewhere.

Does anyone know if the anvil that comes with the DCF520 fits in the DCF510?

Been a long time Makita fan Ego and really hadn’t thought of Milwaukee in my quest of changing power tools from Makita but still keeping Ego. This evening I was thinking why not ‘Milwaukee? it would be really nice to have a single battery system for both regular power tools (impact driver, wrench, archers, inflator, etc.) and outdoor as well (mower, blower, string trimmer).

What is the current consistency today specifically on mower, string, trimmer, and blower from Milwaukee compared to Ego?

The other hand tools I’ll just have to give them a try. I did pick up couple of Dewalt tools and I’ve had a few previously but what is making me think of Milwaukee for the ratchets. Also recently testing the Dewalt impact driver, DCD999, I find my Makita 40V just feels so much better so I was initially going to keep some Makita, but perhaps I will seal those to Milwaukee. What are the thoughts about this?

Edit: I really do appreciate all the replies and honestly I am a bit surprised at the not switch to Milwaukee, at least for hand tools. Another thought of Milwaukee was for cordless ratchets which I picked up the flagship Dewalt but started the 2nd thoughts when I had their flagship impact driver right next to my Makita and how just much better the Makita felt. Honestly even change the bit out while cool the Dewalt you can just push it it, it was annoying taking it out. Not as smooth as Makita.

What about for Outdoor equipment? Specifically mower, blower, and string trimmer? I love my Ego, made the switch to at least the mower with their first one and even just a couple of years ago no one seemed to match them but is it different today with Milwaukee?

Are there any reviews of this? I have the comparable Makita LXT sprayer and it works great but I'd like to move to Dewalt if this is at least equal to Makita.

I have an ICON box with the lockers but I don’t have the hitch. The hutch is too low for me and this is used at home so I don’t need to lock anything up. But I really want the back wall of the hutch. Does anyone have any ideas that would work?

Hello,

I am looking at spray painting my radiator and coolers on my F350 with Rust-Oleum 248903 Automotive High Heat Spray Paint, Flat Black. Would there be any concerns I may have doing so? And is there any prep work, besides cleaning them, that I need to do?

I recently joined a company to help mature their Major Incident Management process, and a big part of that is cleaning up how we use ServiceNow. At previous companies, we modeled incidents a certain way, and I initially tried to recreate that here. But I quickly ran into pushback from our ServiceNow team, who prefer to stay closer to out‑of‑box.

At first, I’ll be honest — OOB felt like it was adding extra records, extra steps, and extra objects that I didn’t think we needed. But as I’ve dug deeper into how ServiceNow and ITIL actually intend these fields to be used, I’m realizing that the OOB model might actually be the cleaner, more scalable approach. I’m learning to lean into it instead of fighting it.

One of the areas I’m working on is implementing outage records and improving how we track which applications/services were impacted. I want accurate reporting for both technical teams and execs.

Here’s the scenario:
A web app goes down. Root cause is DB blocking.
So what should the CI be? The web app or the DB?
And what should go into Affected CIs vs Impacted CIs?

After digging into ITIL and ServiceNow best practices, here’s what I’ve landed on:

• CI (main CI field) = the thing that failed → in this case, the DB
• Affected CIs = components directly involved with the outage → in this case, the DB
• Impacted CIs = the services/apps users actually experienced an outage on → the web app
• Outage records should be tied to the Impacted CI, because that’s what execs care about (“the website was down”), not the technical root cause.

This gives us clean RCA data, clean business impact reporting, and aligns with ServiceNow’s intended data model — without heavy customization. And ironically, the “extra records” I initially resisted are actually what make the model work. I’m starting to appreciate why OOB is structured the way it is.

Curious how others are handling this — especially in orgs trying to move from low maturity to something more structured.

I’m installing a Wolfbox G900 Pro mirror dash cam. I originally planned to run Wolfbox’s hardwire kit to the fuse box, but I noticed the factory rearview mirror already has a constant power wire behind the headliner.

Is tapping that mirror wire a reasonable way to power the cam? My plan is to splice in with an inline fuse at the tap and feed the cam over USB-C.

What I’m really after is whether there’s already a product designed for exactly this — something built to tap into an OE mirror power wire, fuse it, and hand off clean 5V USB-C to the cam. If a purpose-built solution exists, point me to it.

If nothing like that exists, then what exactly do I need to do?

I recently started with a new company to help mature their Major Incident Management process, and while working through that, I’ve run into a related design question around how we handle root cause tracking in ServiceNow.

I want to sanity-check my thinking and see what others are doing from an ITIL / best practice perspective.

At my previous company, our model was:

• Incident record captured:
  • Category/Subcategory
  • Configuration Item (CI) → representing what the customer/user is experiencing
    • e.g., “Website is down” → CI = Website / Application Service
• Then at closure, we captured what we called the “proximate cause”:
  • The closure tab we had a separate CI (or field) indicating what actually caused the issue
    • e.g., Power outage at the data center, failed PDU, network switch, etc.

Not every Major Incident resulted in a Problem record—we used Problems more selectively for recurring or high-value RCA.

At my current company:

• Every Major Incident automatically creates a Problem record
• The Problem is where the root cause CI is tracked
• That works fine for MIs, but…

👉 Outside of Major Incidents, we don’t have a way to track a “causal CI” (root cause CI) for standard incidents.

My question:

For non-major incidents, what is the best practice for capturing the root cause CI?

Options I’m considering:

1. Add a “Caused by CI” / “Causal CI” field on the Incident (possibly at closure)
2. Use related CI relationships (impacted CI vs causal CI)
3. Rely strictly on Problem Management (but that feels excessive for all incidents)
4. Capture it only in free-text resolution/cause fields (less useful for reporting)

What I’m trying to achieve:

• Keep the Incident CI focused on customer impact
• Still be able to report on what actually caused issues (e.g., power, network, hardware trends)
• Avoid creating unnecessary Problem records just to track cause

Questions for the group:

• How are you handling root cause CI tracking for non-major incidents?
• Do you use a secondary CI field on the Incident, or something else?
• Is there anything out-of-the-box in ServiceNow that supports this that I might be missing?
• Any pitfalls to avoid?

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Looking for some advice on how others are handling incident timelines in ServiceNow, especially when using Outage records.

At my current company, we’re starting to mature our incident management process. One change I’m pushing for is using Outage records to track the actual impact window (start/end), instead of relying on when an incident ticket was opened or resolved.

That part makes sense and we’re aligned there.

The problem:
We currently don’t have a way to capture “identified time”, and in practice that often does not match when the ticket is opened.

This happens a lot because:

• Incidents aren’t always created automatically from monitoring
• We sometimes create tickets after the fact
• Or there’s a delay between when the issue is noticed and when it gets formally logged

What I’m used to (prior org): We explicitly tracked three separate timestamps:

• Start time (when the issue began)
• Identified time (when we became aware of it)
• End time (when service was restored)

Where we are now:

• Planning to use Outage records for start + end
• But no clear place or standard for identified time

Questions:

1. How are you tracking identified/detection time in ServiceNow?
   • Custom field on the incident?
   • Derived from something else (alerts, first update, etc.)?
2. If you’re using Outage records, do you store detection time there or only on the incident?
3. How do you handle scenarios where the incident is created after the outage started?
4. Have you standardized definitions for:
   • “Start time” vs “Identified time” vs “Logged time”?

My concern:
Without a true “identified time,” it’s really hard to measure:

• Detection speed (MTTD)
• Gaps in monitoring
• Whether incidents are being noticed late vs just logged late

Would really appreciate seeing how others have implemented this, especially in environments where automation isn’t fully there yet.

Looking for some advice as we’re maturing our incident response model and trying to figure out what “good” looks like.

Current situation:

• We don’t have a true 24x7 NOC or operations team
• Multiple teams (including mine) are on-call
• But there’s no real validation/triage layer before paging people
• In practice, I was to handle major incidents but there are many things lacking.

There’s been discussion about introducing an on-call group specifically to validate incidents after hours before paging engineering, which sounds like a step in the right direction—but we don’t have a clear model yet.

On top of that, we’re also revisiting SLAs/severity definitions.

Right now:

• Sev 1 = 24x7
• Sev 2 = 12x5

In my previous experience:

• Sev 1 = revenue-impacting, all-hands-on-deck (e.g., checkout down)
• Sev 2 = still critical but not immediate revenue loss (loss of redundancy, major internal systems down, etc.)
• Both Sev 1 and Sev 2 were 24x7, just with different urgency/visibility

So it feels odd to me that a major Sev 2 incident might sit until business hours.

Main questions:

1. How do you handle after-hours incident validation without a dedicated NOC?
   • Do you have a “triage” or “duty officer” role?
   • Do alerts go straight to engineers, or is there a filter layer?
2. Have you implemented a lightweight model that works without a full 24x7 operations team?
3. Is it common in your orgs for Sev 2 to not be 24x7, or would you expect those to still trigger overnight paging?
4. If you were designing this from scratch, would you:
   • Stand up a centralized on-call triage function first?
   • Or push teams to own alert validation themselves?

My current thinking:

• We need some kind of validation layer before waking people up
• But we also shouldn’t under-react to real Sev 2 issues just because they’re not revenue-impacting
• And right now it feels like we’re in an in-between state without clear ownership or process

Would really appreciate hearing how others have solved this, especially in orgs that didn’t start with a full NOC.

Been using this TV in my garage for a few years with no issues. Unplugged it about 6 months ago and just plugged it back in today — now I’m getting full-screen colored vertical lines. Every time I power cycle it the color changes, but it’s always the same pattern of vertical banding across the entire display.

No remote, so I paired a spare LG remote and was able to turn it off and on a couple times, but even that stopped responding after a bit. Trying to change inputs did nothing.

No physical damage to the screen. Given the full-screen nature of it and the color shifting between power cycles, I’m leaning toward T-CON board rather than a panel failure — but wanted to get some input before I pull the back off and start buying parts.

Anyone dealt with this on a C1? Is the T-CON a reasonable first shot here

I’m looking for advice from ServiceNow and ITIL practitioners on incident communications.

At previous companies, we had a custom communications tab within the Incident record. We could send IT-facing communications with technical details and, when needed, separate business-facing communications with more generic language. The system would pull distribution lists and other data automatically.

I’ve also worked at a large government agency that used the Major Incident Workbench. It worked there because they had a dedicated Major Incident Management team. In my current role, I am essentially the entire Major Incident function, so the Workbench feels like it adds complexity we don’t really need. Even at the government agency, the primary feature we used was the notification capability.

My question is: Is there an out-of-the-box ServiceNow capability for sending incident communications to IT and business stakeholders without using the Major Incident Workbench? Or is the Workbench essentially the only OOTB option?

My initial thought is to have our ServiceNow team build a simple communications tab on the Incident form that would:

• Always send technical updates to IT distribution lists.
• Optionally send business-facing communications.
• Pull business contacts automatically from the associated CI or service.
• Allow separate messaging for IT and business audiences.

Before proposing a custom solution, I’m curious whether ServiceNow already provides something similar out of the box that I’m overlooking.

What are other organizations doing for incident communications, especially smaller teams where the Major Incident Workbench may be overkill?

I’m trying to figure out the best way to handle this in ServiceNow.

What I need is for incidents to track a few specific timestamps:

• Start Time – when the actual outage/problem began, not when the ticket was created
  • Example: a system goes down at 1 PM, but nobody notices or reports it until 3 PM. I need the incident to reflect the 1 PM start time.
• Identified Time – when the outage was first noticed/detected
• End Time – when the system/service was actually restored, not when the ticket was marked resolved
• Total Duration – calculated from the actual outage start to restoration time

I initially assumed ServiceNow might already have something out of the box for this, but I haven’t been able to find anything that cleanly matches these use cases. My thought was to add custom fields to the Incident table, but the ServiceNow team at my new job is pushing back pretty hard on customizations.

Has anyone handled this requirement before? Is there an OOTB approach in ServiceNow for tracking actual outage timelines separate from ticket lifecycle timestamps, or is this typically done with custom fields/workflows?

Looking for some honest consensus from people who’ve been down this road.

I picked up an ‘08 F350 with the 6.4 last year, mainly because I needed a cheapish one-ton to move across the country. It’s been a great truck so far. I bought it from the original owner, and they kept up on it — and I’ve spent money keeping it as solid as I can since. It’s seen a lot of trips and towed trailers all over, so the body isn’t perfect, but it had no major damage until my wife backed her car into the front driver’s side. So now I’m looking at a fender at minimum.

That repair got me thinking bigger. I’ve already been planning to black out the interior, do sound deadening, and put in a real audio system. And since I’m into the front end anyway, I’ve been toying with swapping to the 2011 front end while I’m at it. It all adds up fast.

The other thing in the back of my mind: this is a 6.4, so realistically it could grenade at any moment. So I’ve been thinking through what I’d do when that day comes:

• Cummins swap — I haven’t priced it exactly, but even at \~$20k for a 2009 common-rail Cummins, I’d be fine with that. I’d take a Cummins over even the 6.7 Ford. (I am not actually sure of what the swap will cost me)

• Reman 6.4 — These don’t seem too expensive, and it’d keep the truck simple/factory. My big question here is who builds the best one, and whether a good reman actually corrects the known 6.4 weak points so I’m not back in the same spot later.

But then the math kind of flips on me — I feel like I could just grab a 2016 for around $25k. Probably more miles, but better motor then the 6.4, better interior, already has the front end I like, and already blacked out inside. The catch is I’m not willing to spend more than that 2016 costs to get where I want to be.

So here’s the question: do I keep the ’08, build it out, and either reman the 6.4 or go Cummins when the motor lets go? Or do I skip all that and just get into the 2016?

And if you’ve run a reman 6.4 — who’d you go with, and did it actually fix the original problems?

What would you do?

Want me to tighten it up or aim it at a specific sub?

Far too often I am picking up a really good order. Going to find out on the fifth driver that has been there. And I’m sure our way also experience, it’s incredibly rare that the Restaurant will make the order again. If I select somebody else already picked up the order. Does Uber just keep sending drivers? I can imagine after the first person stole it that subsequent drivers are marking that the order already picked up. And I can understand Uber sends another driver maybe the third time but after that, they shouldn’t be sending drivers anymore. They should kill that order. The question is when does Uber stop sending drivers?