Incident logging

Incident identification

Process activities, methods and techniques

The process to be followed during the management of an incident is shown in Figure 4.2. The process includes the following steps.

Figure 4.2 Incident Management process flow

Work cannot begin on dealing with an incident until it is known that an incident has occurred. It is usually unacceptable, from a business perspective, to wait until a user is impacted and contacts the Service Desk. As far as possible, all key component s should be monitored so that failure s or potential failures are detected early so that the Incident Management process can be started quickly. Ideally, incidents should be resolved before they have an impact on users!

Please see section 4.1 for further details.

All incident s must be fully logged and date/time stamped, regardless of whether they are raised through a Service Desk telephone call or whether automatically detected via an event alert.

Note: If Service Desk and/or support staff visit the customer s to deal with one incident, they may be asked to deal with further incidents ‘while they are there’. It is important that if this is done, a separate Incident Record is logged for each additional incident handled – to ensure that a historical record is kept and credit is given for the work undertaken.

All relevant information relating to the nature of the incident must be logged so that a full historical record is maintained – and so that if the incident has to be referred to other support group (s), they will have all relevant information to hand to assist them.

The information needed for each incident is likely to include:

• Unique reference number
• Incident categorization (often broken down into between two and four levels of sub-categories)
• Incident urgency
• Incident impact
• Incident prioritization
• Date/time recorded
• Name/ID of the person and/or group recording the incident
• Method of notification (telephone, automatic, e-mail, in person, etc.)
• Name/department/phone/location of user
• Call-back method (telephone, mail, etc.)
• Description of symptoms
• Incident status (active, waiting, closed, etc.)
• Related CI
• Support group/person to which the incident is allocated
• Related problem / Known Error
• Activities undertaken to resolve the incident
• Resolution date and time
• Closure category
• Closure date and time.

Note: If the Service Desk does not work 24/7 and responsibility for first-line incident logging and handling passes to another group, such as IT Operations or Network Support, out of Service Desk hours, then these staff need to be equally rigorous about logging of incident details. Full training and awareness needs to be provided to such staff on this issue.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23