Create a Major Incident when any large scale outage occurs or when an outage impacts a large number of people. Work the Major Incident until the outage is resolved or a workaround is in place.
- For an overview of the working through major outages process, read Understand the Use of Major Incidents.
This article covers these topics:
Creating a Major Incident ticket
Once a major outage is identified, the identifying team, in consultation with the Service Owner, should create a Major Incident ticket. The ticket can be created from any of the Incident tickets already open for that outage or as a new ticket from the U of M Ticketing app.
Beginning a Major Incident from an Existing Incident Ticket
- Navigate to one of the Incident tickets dealing with the major outage.
- Select the Action menu in the Incident ticket; choose Create Parent from the dropdown menu.
The Select Application/Form window pops open. - Choose Major Incident Form. A Major Incident form appears. All the fields from the original Incident form are populated just as they were.
- Move on to Filling out the Major Incident ticket fields.
Beginning a Major Incident Ticket from a new ticket
You can also create the Major Incident ticket directly from the UofM ticketing application.
- Select +New.
- Choose Major Incident from the dropdown menu.
- Move on to Filling out the Major Incident ticket fields.
Filling out the Major Incident ticket fields
- Go to the Major incident Manager field.
- This field defaults to the person who opened the Major Incident Form.
- If needed, change the field to the appropriate person who will be the manager for the Major Incident.
- Write a Clear, Short Title for the Ticket that accurately reflects what is going on in the Major Incident.
- Ideally, it should contain the name of the affected service and a very brief description of the issue. The information in this field will be included in all Major Incident Notifications, hence the need for brevity.
- Enter a Description.
- If you created the Major Incident from an existing Incident ticket the Description field will have auto-populated text [Creating parent for incident #].
- The information contained in this field will populate into the Problem ticket when created.
- Delete any pre-populated text.
- Writing from the user's perspective, enter a clear, concise description of the Major Incident.
- Information in the description is visible to all staff, so avoid technicial details or information not necessary for a wider audience
- Review the following guidelines for completing the additional ticket fields.
- Make sure this field is populated with a Group name, not a person.
- Note: The Responsible field is not connected to the Major Incident Manager field above.
- In most cases, the overall Priority should come out to be either P1 - Critical or P2 - High. There may be outlier situations where P3 or P4 is necessary.
- Service: Select the appropriate Service for the outage (e.g. a Wifi outage falls under the Data Network Services/Eduroam service). Start typing the technology involved to see what Service area comes up or click Lookup Service to search.
- Type: Use the Lookup Type button and choose the best option (There are only 40 Ticket Types possible.)
- Responsible: select the Group taking responsibility for fixing the major incident.
- Impact and Urgency: Adjust these fields to match the criticality of the Major Incident.
- Contact: Include any necessary people (Service Owners, Managers, etc.) who should be contacted about the progress of the Major Incident.
- Location: Leave empty unless the major incident is related to a single campus building.
- Asset/CI: In most cases, this field will be left blank unless a specific asset is directly related to the major incident.
- Tags: Only use this field if you have a very specific need to pull reports based on a tag.
- Attachment: Use only if a file relating to the major incident needs to be attached.
- Select Save (top of window). The current window closes and is replaced with a confirmation window, including the Major Incident ID #.
- Choose View the Major Incident you just created to continue working on the ticket, or close the window to go back to the U of M Tickets application.