Preparing to work on a major incident

Note: Read this if you are an Admin of your IT workspace

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Working with the Major Incident ticket type
  • Customization of Major Incident ticket fields
  • Set SLA Policy
  • Set agent permissions
  • Set up workflows

As the Admin of your organization’s Freshservice instance, you first need to make arrangements for your agents to be able to make use of the module. These changes can be bucketed into three main categories:

1. Working with the Major Incident ticket type

   1. Customization of Major Incident ticket fields

   2. Setting SLA Policy for Major Incident

   3. Setting agent permissions

   4. Setting up workflows

2. Setting up the Status Page

3. Setting up collaboration apps

Working with the Major Incident ticket type

At the core of Major Incident Management is a new ticket type – Major Incident. This ticket type can be used to define permissions, set SLAs, workflows, etc. to drive an appropriate response – distinct from ones used for regular incidents – to contain the impact of the issue fast.

Customization of Major Incident ticket fields

The Major Incident ticket type is enabled by default. This ticket type has special fields that you can make use of using Form Fields. 

Where? Admin >> Field Manager >> Form Fields

The options under each field are editable.

• Major incident type: The options underneath are editable:

  • Full outage

  • Partial outage

  • Performance degradation

• Business impact

• Impacted locations

• Number of customers impacted

Set SLA Policy

You would naturally want Major Incidents to be rectified faster than regular incidents, for which you’ll need to design a new SLA policy. This policy would use the ticket type ‘Major Incident’ to enforce the new SLA.

Where? Admin >> SLA Policies >> New SLA Policy

Set agent permissions

Not every agent is qualified to create a major incident, or promote an incident to a major incident, or to demote a major incident. Only the Admin, by default, is allowed to take these actions. If you want other agents to be able to create/promote/demote a major incident, create a new role and set permissions accordingly.

Where? Admin >> Roles >> New Role

Set up workflows

Major Incidents require instant attention and action. Utilize workflows with ticket type Major Incident as a condition, to elicit the right level of response from the right agents and stakeholders.

Where? Admin >> Workflow Automator

Next: Set up Status Page

Previous: Working with major incidents in Freshservice