Severity Level: What is it?

February 5, 2014

| General

Another word we toss around is the word ‘Severity.’ This is second nature to us and to our techs, and we sometimes forget that it has a very specific meaning to IT organizations.

We rank all incidents (something is broken, I need Nucleus to fix it) tickets by severity so that we know what order to conquer as they come in.

These severities are laid out in our customer agreements but it would be useful for you to understand what they are and how we rank tickets.

SEVERITY

DEFINITION

1 (Urgent)

Critical Business Impact: Indicates a total inability to use an application system or a component of an application system, resulting in a critical impact on client operation where:

The incident affects Customer’s entire organization or location; and
There is no work-around or manual process available; and
The incident must be resolved immediately. Examples:
- Corporate data outages
- Systems outages such as corporate-wide email outages
- Domain Controller services outages such as authentication, DHCP, or DNS that have critical business impact
- Critical business services outages such as complete business application failures

2 (High)

High Business Impact: Indicates a total inability to use an application or computer system, or a component of an application or computer system, resulting in a critical impact on a single client where;

The incident affects a key individual whose job function is critical to the organization, an application that is critical to a specific user, or a VIP user within the organization as defined by Customer or a department; and
There is no work-around or manual process available

Examples:

Localized network outages such as a single switch failure that affects a small number of users. The work around would be that the users could access the network remotely or from a different work area.
Individual server service failures or interruptions such as printing are not working and the print spooler is required to be restarted.
Issues that impair a Senior Staff’s ability to perform their work.
Critical business application issues where users report error messages or performance issues that impair their ability to work in the application but it is not a complete failure.

3 (Medium)

Medium Business Impact: A computer outage affecting a single client, where:

The incident affects an individual who has not been identified as having a job function that is critical to the organization or a VIP user within the organization; and
Indicates an ability to use the application system without functions that are not critical to overall operations; and
A work-around may or may not be available

Examples:

Single PC issues, the user is not a VIP and can either work from a spare PC or remotely.
Any single user application issue where it is not a system failure and local to that user or PC and the user is not a VIP or performing a critical business function at the time.
General how to help and problems with productivity.
Localized to the user performance issues

Work Orders

4 (Low)

Service Request: A request for a change to a functioning system. Typically these do not affect multiple peopleExamples: