Defining Incident Severities

[guest925]

I am seeking input on the standard practice for defining severity rating for IT incident/problems such as computer, network and application outages?

For example:
Sev 3 - one user service outage
Sev 2 - business unit/dept service outage (more than 1 user)
Sev 1 - division or whole company service outage

I am probably missing serveral other possible considerations in the above example. Is it typical that the severity definitions are customized to the indivual business? Any experiences or opinions on this topic are appreciated?

[mcardinal]

This decision might also be driven by the tool you use for Service Management. Different tools will look at the determination of priority from varied perspectives.

IMHO it is hard to categorize specific events to specific priorities, impacts or severities. One way may be to look back at the types of outages you have seen, categorize or group them, and set your severities accordingly.

Another is to define your services and use the SLAs to help determine what is important. Set your priorities based on the SLAs.

A third way is to use you business continuity info to help determine what is important and set priorities based on the business importance.

Good luck

Michael