Best Practice on Outages Question

[stephaniet]

We are looking to start using outages in our instance soon.   We have always had it enabled, but it's never been used.   In this post, I'm talking about unexpected outages.   I was wondering what the best practice is on opening an outage.   Should it be opened from the Incident or from the Problem?

Our current set up is that we open incidents when we start getting calls about an issue.   If the incident is deemed to be a high sev, we upgrade it and start our high sev process.   It makes sense to me to open an Outage record at this point, but I don't know if that is correct.   Once the high sev is resolved, a Problem Record is created (again, this is in our set up, I don't know if there is a better way to do this.   I appreciate any feedback on this process).   The Problem is updated with an RCA and closed with the resolution.

I have been trying to find information on how Outages are supposed to be used (process-wise).   But everything I have been able to find is specific to how to open one, and not what the process is.   Thank you for your anticipated ideas!

[tolga1]

Hi Stephanie

It's difficult to say, what's right and what's wrong. A big part of this question also depends on the definition of an outage. What do you consider as an outage? At ServiceNow, if you report an incident and say, you can't reach the system, then we consider it as an outage, even if the instance seems running on our side. When opening an incident, it's helpful to have a field on the form asking whether the user can access the system or not. And if it's only you or all (looking on your neighbours screen may give you an indication.. ). With these fields, an outage can be opened automatically and the priority can be set automatically. The first goal of the agent then is to make the system accessible again. As soon as the end user states that he can access the system again, then outage can be closed. A problem ticket can be created during or after the incident, this is a separate process again. But from an outage point of view, it's really on how you decide about an outage. There are other companies, where only agents can create outage records after an initial assessment. There's no right or wrong.

Maybe it also helps to think about what you want to do with these outage records at the end. I'm sure, you want to report on them. Maybe you also have SLAs on them. And also a factor could be, what consequences these outages have at the end (maybe penalties for a vendor?). All these questions may influence the timing of when an outage should be created.

[angeliccharm]

Hi Stephanie,

Pleasure to meet you. I think Tolga summed this up quite nicely. We concur. When it comes to process in this regard there isn't a 100% right way to do it, as every organization is different and what they constitute an outage is different and how their process fits in with other processes is different.

[tolga1]

Hi Lisa

Thanks.

stephaniet, can you please mark my answer ans helpful or resolved, if it helped you?

Many thanks and have a nice day!

Tolga