Question on Outage Record

[nirwan_ritik]

We are investigating into the use of Outage records as a potential solution for large-scale, widespread system outages. P1 notifications are not on the same scale as, for example, a Crowdstrike type of outage.

We need to know

1. How can this be used?

2. Are there additional processes or capabilities it introduces?

3. What guardrails do we need to put in place before activating?

4. Are there impacts on reporting or other unknowns we need to investigate?

Would really appreciate inputs in this area 🙂
Regards,
Ritik

[allan735ber]

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@nirwan_ritik wrote:

We are investigating into the use of Outage records as a potential solution for large-scale, widespread system outages. P1 notifications are not on the same scale as, for example, a Crowdstrike type of outage.

We need to know

1. How can this be used?

2. Are there additional processes or capabilities it introduces?

3. What guardrails do we need to put in place before activating?

4. Are there impacts on reporting or other unknowns we need to investigate?

Would really appreciate inputs in this area 🙂
Regards,
Ritik

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The Xerox C315 receives an IP address but remains unreachable. Check cable connections, switch port status, and firewall rules. Verify printer IP settings, protocol settings, and look for error messages. Test another device on the switch port. Contact Xerox support if issues persist.

[Dan O Connor]

Outages are a pretty simple feature in ServiceNow. They can be used for just internal tracking or can be published out automatically to a Service Portal or Employee Center so staff can see any current outages or planned outages coming through Change or maintenance. 

1. How can this be used?

Pretty simply, you can just navigate to Outages and create a new record. However I'd advise against this and instead build it into existing process' like Change Manage or Major Incident management, where as part of the process an Outage is created.

2. Are there additional processes or capabilities it introduces?

By default it will publish outages to the System Status page so can be viewed realtime through a Portal or Employee Center. If only for internal use you probably dont have these pages activated or displayed so outages can just be viewed as records, through Dashboards or as part of CMDB views.  

3. What guardrails do we need to put in place before activating?

As per 1. just how you wish to use it, I would suggest as part of a process. The outage record is super straight forward and self explanatory. You ideally want to tie outages to Services. Nobody will care or understand there is an outage against Switch AGF-265. However they will care and want to know if that Switch is part of a Business Service that is down. 

4. Are there impacts on reporting or other unknowns we need to investigate?

No negative impacts if thats what you mean. Having outages in place provides some nice metrics around availability and uptime that you can leverage as is OOTB, or add your own reporting or Dashboards bsaed on outage records. 

AN interesting Metric for example is Outages caused by Change. So where a Change has not gone to plan and resulted in an OUtage.

You will see on the Outage form you typically link another task/record to it. 

[nirwan_ritik]

Thanks for your inputs Dan. Had one more question in this regard. How are we going to utilize the notifications? Could you please help me understand the triggers, recipients and volume?

[Dan O Connor]

Out of the box we only support notifications to users who have subscribed to a Service to track its status. This is typically done via System Status page where users can define if they want to stay updated on Services they consider important.

Some users will, some won't. But the option is there.

There is no typical notifications OOTB in terms of internally in IT. There is the System Status page and its assumed you have some Dashboards or visuals setup to track your stuff. However nothing stopping you creating your own notifications on these if you want or need more.

But again Outages typically work as part of a process. So there might already be notifications in place handling this. Say for example a Major Incident, you likely already have comms in place for this so there is no need for an additional outage notification