Incident Severity Levels

Modified on Tue, 23 May 2023 at 12:36 PM

While there is no universal definition for classifying incident severity levels, we use ITIL and ISO recommended best practices within our ticketing portal in order to provide the best level of service to all of our customers.

We appreciate that any issue reported to us is generally sufficiently frustrating for you as the end-user to want a quick resolution, it is important to correctly report the impact to allow us to provide the best response.

Raising a minor issue as Urgent may initially appear to be the best way to force a quicker response to your ticket but may actually be counter-productive as we respond with set incident response procedures. Consider also a real-world, total-outage scenario in which we are unable to resolve quickly for you as our engineers are responding to a previously raised, minor issue, that had been incorrectly raised as Urgent.

Our engineers have visibility of tickets created from multiple users within the same company and will raise the severity if required to reflect the issue as it evolves.

Severity Level	Formal Description	Examples
URGENT	A critical problem that affects a large number of users in your business.	A server outage resulting in all users unable to use Line of Business applications.
HIGH	A significant incident affecting a limited number of users in your business.	A connection issue affecting multiple users such as an office or single branch site location.
MEDIUM	An incident that causes errors, minor problems for users, or a heavy system load.	A minor issue affecting many users, or a single business critical user affected by a significant issue.
LOW	An issue that affects a single user or a minor problem that affects a system or service but doesn't have a serious impact on users.	Password, Workstation (including ancillaries) and single user connectivity issues.