Major Incident Management in Service Operations Workspace

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 1 minute to read

    • Create and manage major incidents in Service Operations Workspace.

    Major Incident Management overview

    Figure 1. Major incident record
    Major incident record

    A major incident (MI) is created when an issue occurs that results in significant disruption to the business and demands a response beyond the normal incident management process.

    Major incidents have a separate procedure with shorter timescales and higher priorities to encourage a faster resolution process for the incidents with a high business impact.

    The definition of what constitutes a major incident must be determined based on your requirements. For example, a major incident can be created if a critical business service is impacted or if there’s a service outage that affects many users.

    Major incident user roles

    The major incident manager (major_incident_manager) user role is available in the base system and enables you to manage and resolve major incidents. As a major incident manager, you can do the following:

    • Promote a major incident candidate to a major incident.
    • Create a major incident.
    • Directly promote an incident to a major incident without going through the proposal process.

    Major incident creation

    A major incident is created or promoted from a major incident candidate. A major incident candidate can be created from the incident record page in Service Operations Workspace in the following ways:

    • Propose an incident as a major incident candidate.
    • Create a major incident candidate.
    • Use major incident trigger rules to propose an incident as a major incident candidate or promote directly to a major incident automatically.

    Major incident response and handling

    When responding to a major incident, some crucial actions include the following:
    • Finding the correct resources
    • Communicating updates to users and stakeholders
    • Setting up conference calls to investigate and resolve the incident
    • Escalating the incident when required

    You must define the communication plans that are associated with a major incident based on pre-defined conditions. Incident communication plans and related communication tasks are created for a major incident based on the communication plan definitions. Afterwards, tasks get executed as defined in the associated incident communication.