Creating a Major Incident Ticket and Adding Child Tickets
The purpose of a Major Incident is to link like tickets together to streamline incident management during large production down (break-fix) issues affecting multiple people and/or systems. Incident management is intended to be a very fast process, helping users get back up and running, with a work around if possible, to address break-fix issues. Problem management is an intentional process that is used to find the root cause of recurring issues, which could have been classified originally as a Major Incident.
Once you have created the Major Incident, make sure you post it in the INFT-ITS-Department ITS Major Incident - Problem Resolution Channel.
Note. If you downgrade a Major Incident to an Incident the linking of the Child tickets will be lost.
Examples of a Major Incident
- Printing is down for campus.
- Reports of multiple servers or systems being down.
- Reports of WiFi outages throughout campus.
Creating a Major Incident Ticket
- Go to the IT Tickets tab > +New > Major Incident Form
- Fill out the form as usual, the Requestor is the IT staff opening the Major Incident. By default this ticket has a High priority. It should be assigned to the group whose area of responsibility the problem is occurring in.
- Also, make sure that the initial description is client friendly because it will copy over to child tickets. If more technical details need to be added, the submitter can do so as an update to the ticket after it is created.
Adding Child Tickets to the Major Incident Ticket
- Go to the IT Tickets tab > Left Menu > Tickets > Major Incidents
- All open major incident tickets will be listed, with the most recently-modified ones at the top
- Locate the correct major incident ticket and open it
- Click the Children tab at the top of the page
- Click Add New > Child Incident - this will create a new (child) incident attached to the ticket
- Check that Responsible cascaded from the existing Major Incident to the new (child) ticket.
or
- Click Add Existing > Child Incident - this will link an existing ticket to the Major Incident
- This will list all open tickets, note that it may be difficult to pick out the child tickets from the list. Check the box for each ticket to be added as a child, then click Add Selected at the top of the page.
- Change Responsible to the same as indicated on the existing Major Incident.
- Change the Requestor to the person who is reporting the problem
- Uncheck the Notify Responsible box under the Responsible field (the responsible group doesn't need to get notified every time a child ticket is added).
Updating and Closing a Major Incident Ticket
- Updating: When updating a Major Incident ticket with details of the resolution process, make sure that "Cascade" is NOT checked, and that no clients are notified, unless the update is specifically geared towards providing clients with updated information about the status of the resolution. In that case, do the opposite, making sure that Cascade IS checked and that Cascade Notification has the appropriate roles selected (Requestors, Responsible, etc.).
- Closing: When closing a Major Incident ticket that has child tickets, both the parent and all child tickets can be closed at the same time, thus notifying all clients of the resolution. Make sure that the final update is written in client-friendly language, that Cascade is checked, and that Cascade Notification has the appropriate roles selected (Requestors, Responsible, etc.).