Overview
We use one simplified 'Case' ticket form that can be identified with a sub-type of 'Incident' or 'Request'. All cases must be one of the two, and can only be one of the two. Since January 2021, both sub-types are measured against the same SLAs, but this may change in the future. Generally, Incident breaches are of more a concern than Request breaches, but a breach is still considered a breach.
Case Types
Incident
An incident represents an unplanned interruption or reduction in quality of a service. We have specific response and resolution commitments to our clients specified in the ITS Incident Priority Matrix and SLA Targets page. Non-ITS customers can choose to honor the ITS targets or not, but there are not presently any alternative SLAs.
Request
Requests are cases from clients who are requesting service or action from us. These can either be short-term or long-term cases. If a request is kicking off a project or longer term
development work, it is best practice to migrate that request to project management software (such as JIRA), and close the ServiceNow case with reference to the ticket created in the project management software.
SLA Commitments
All cases will be subject to the Resolution times below. SLA times are only calculated for Monday - Friday, 8:00am to 4:30pm exclusive of university holidays.
|
Priority |
Description |
Target Incident Resolution Time (Goal: 85% success rate) |
Target Request Resolution Time (Goal: 85% success rate) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Emergency | 4 hours | 4 hours |
| 2 | High | 8 hours | 8 hours |
| 3 | Medium | 3 days | 3 days |
| 4 | Low | 5 days | 15 days |
Incident Prioritization
An incident is defined as an unplanned interruption or reduction in quality of an ITS service. Resolution of an incident is achieved by the recovery of the service, where necessary by means of a workaround. A workaround is defined as a temporary solution aimed at reducing or eliminating the impact of the root cause of the incident for which a full resolution is not yet available.
- The Priority in ServiceNow defines the impact and urgency of a particular Incident and establishes the target completion time for Incidents of a specific priority.
- Impact is generally based on the number of people affected, or the specific user that is affected.
- Urgency is defined as the speed with which an incident needs to be addressed. It is determined by the business criticality of the service affected by the Incident and the systems or users involved.
- The resolution time below will be an enterprise high level target to provide a standard time expectation across the organization. As the Incident Management process matures in the organization, the resolution times will evolve from high level targets to proper service level agreements.
The combination impact and urgency will drive the priority. The full listing of these combinations is as follows:
|
Impact | |||||
|
1 - Emergency |
2 – High |
3 - Medium |
4 - Low | ||
|
Urgency |
1 – Emergency |
1 |
1 |
2 |
2 |
|
2 – High |
1 |
2 |
3 |
3 | |
|
3 – Medium |
2 |
3 |
3 |
4 | |
|
4 – Low |
3 |
3 |
4 |
4 | |
Impact Definitions
Emergency impact - 1
- Campus-wide service is disabled
- Multiple locations' service completely down during operating hours
- Incident causes immediate, adverse impact on teaching-related services/instruction affecting over 250 individuals
- Incident causes immediate and significant service disruption that affects personal safety or could result in death
- Incident causes immediate, adverse impact on business transactions
- Over 250 individuals are impacted by the Incident
- No workaround available
High impact - 2
- Campus-wide service working, but service is significantly degraded affecting critical business transactions
- Campus-wide service is significantly degraded, but not impacting personal safety or potentially risking death
- Single location's service completely disabled during operating hours
- Incident causes immediate, adverse impact on teaching-related services/instruction affecting between 10 and 250 individuals
- Between 10 and 250 individuals are impacted by the Incident
- No workaround available
Medium impact - 3
- Single location's service degraded
- Development or test service impacted during non-critical timeframe
- Incident will cause a short-term disruption of service, but long-term impact will be negligible
- Between 2 and 10 individuals are impacted by the Incident
- Work around may be available
Low impact - 4
- Incident causes a negative impact on service outside of the normal operating hours for that service
- If unresolved, the negative impact of the Incident does not significantly increase over time
- Incident does not prevent staff from completing "time sensitive" tasks
- Incident does not affect more than one individual
Urgency Definitions
Emergency Urgency - 1
- If the Incident remains unresolved, the health and/or safety of one or more individuals will be affected very quickly, if not immediately
- If the Incident remains unresolved, the risk for a major financial loss or severe, negative impact to the organization's reputation will occur very quickly in relation to a large portion of UCSD campus (e.g. an entire college, 3 or more ITS customer groups, etc.)
- If the Incident remains unresolved, a large number of UCSD staff will quickly be unable to perform their daily tasks
- Caller indicates the issue is an "emergency"
- The Incident affects a large portion of the UCSD campus (e.g. an entire college, 3 or more customer groups, etc.) and no viable alternative solution or workaround exists
High Urgency - 2
- If the Incident remains unresolved, the risk for a medium-sized financial loss or substantial, negative impact to the organization's reputation will occur very quickly in relation to a large portion of UCSD campus (e.g. an entire college, 3 or more ITS customer groups, etc.)
- The Incident affects a large portion of the UCSD campus (e.g. an entire college, 3 or more ITS customer groups, etc.) and the alternative solution or workaround is considered complex
- If the Incident remains unresolved, the staff of an academic unit, administrative unit, building or department will quickly be unable to perform their daily tasks
Medium Urgency - 3
- If the Incident remains unresolved, the risk for a modest financial loss or a modest, negative impact to the organization's reputation will occur very quickly in relation to a large portion of UCSD campus (e.g. an entire college, 3 or more ITS customer groups, etc.)
- The Incident affects a large portion of the UCSD campus (e.g. an entire college, 3 or more ITS customer groups, etc.) and the alternative solution or workaround is considered disruptive and somewhat risky
- If the Incident remains unresolved, the staff of an academic unit, administrative unit, building or department will intermittently be unable to perform their daily tasks
Low Urgency - 4
- Incident occurs outside of the normal operating hours and/or the inability to perform work for an extended period of time will not be overly burdensome
- Work can continue indefinitely with a minimum increase in effort by staff or tolerance of some additional inconvenience
- If the Incident remains unresolved, other clients, rooms, offices or individuals will not be significantly impacted
- Failure to resolve the Incident will never affect users outside of IT Services Operations
Pre-2020
There used to be a separate 'Response Time' SLA, we have removed this SLA and replaced it with a field called 'First Reply Time'. See the 'First Reply' fields on Case Table reporting. The SLAs that we had for Response are below.
|
Priority |
Description |
Target Response Time (Goal: 90% success rate) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Emergency | 15 minutes |
| 2 | High | 30 minutes |
| 3 | Medium | 2 hours |
| 4 | Low | 1 business day |
If you still have questions or need additional assistance, please use the 'Contact ServiceNow Team' form.