A major incident (MI) is an incident that results in significant disruption to the business and demands a response beyond the routine incident management process. Major incidents often have a separate business procedure with shorter timescales and urgency that is required to accelerate resolution process for incidents with high business impact.
The definition of what constitutes a major incident is often determined by the Service Desk and/or the Service Manager. For example, a major incident could be created if a critical business service is impacted or if there is a service outage that affects a large number of users.
Major Incident Criteria
- Critical system(s) have a service outage, or
- Moderate to large numbers of campus customers have been impacted because of loss of service or a significant degradation of service, or
- Moderate to large numbers of campus customers have lost service within a time-sensitive window, or
- Needs to be customer facing
- Propose an incident as a major incident candidate by clicking Propose Major Incident from the Incident context menu. (All service technicians)
- Once an incident has been proposed as a Major Incident candidate, a Major Incident Manager will review the issue with the appropriate service provider and either promote or reject the candidate.
- Promote a candidate to a major incident by clicking Create a Major Incident from the context menu. (requires Major Incident Manager role)
- Reject a candidate (requires Major Incident Manager role)
- Create a new major incident by clicking Create Major Incident from the left navigation pane (requires Major Incident Manager role)
- Adding preexisting incidents to a Major Incident parent ticket (All service technicians)
- Adding new, incoming incidents to a Major Incident parent ticket (All service technicians)
Communications
Our primary communication between the Service Desk and the Service Providers will take place using Slack. Communications should utilize the active-issues channel on the ucbpi.slack.com instance. For access to this channel, please contact UC Berkeley's point of contact for Slack.
Here is more information on Slack and general Slack etiquette.
Crucial things in responding to a major incident are to involve right resources, communicate updates to users and stakeholders, setup conference calls to investigate and resolve the incident, and escalate when required.
Outside of Business Hours
Service managers will serve as the Major Incident Manager until the next business day of the Service Desk. They will have minimal responsibilities in this space as their primary focus will be resolving the incident.
Lisa Hisson is the process owner for incident and major incident.
Additional questions? Please send email to the ServiceNow Support team for help with your question: servicenow-support@berkeley.edu