Freshservice Alert Management can automatically create incident tickets from alerts based on Alert Workflows. The priority of such incidents is based on the severity of the alerts.
Typically, once the priority of an incident is set, it is changed only manually by agents working on that particular issue. This setup is beneficial for the IT Service Desk.
However, Digital Ops Teams, that work on incidents originating from their digital infrastructure, can make use of Alert Automations to gain a view into the increasing severity of an issue. When Alert Automation for this feature is enabled, the priority of an incident automatically increases in sync with the increasing severity of an alert.
The severity of an alert is the severity of the latest notification that is added to its alert logs
In Freshservice, an alert is a group of notifications from a common resource and with a common metric. For instance, all notifications regarding SSD CPU Utilization are grouped together to form a single alert, Alert-889. The alert severity starts off as a Warning, then graduates to Critical, and then gets resolved as a notification with OK severity flows in.
A static incident priority can be misleading
A static priority value can be misleading to teams working to solve an issue. For instance, an incident formed with medium priority with a warning alert, which subsequently turns critical, could lead agents to underestimate the consequences of the incident.
The severity of Alert-889 starts off as a Warning. If, as per the associated Alert Workflow, an incident is created, it would be with Medium priority. Later, the alert graduates to Critical severity. However, the priority of the incident remains Medium. This could mislead agents to underestimate the underlying issue.
Improve context by automatically updating priority
When incident priority is automatically based on changes in alert severity, Digital Ops teams get a ring-side view into the status of an issue. They are able to prioritize on the fly, and recalibrate their efforts for addressing any issue.
Note: Updating the alert severity will automatically adjust the incident priority upwards. However, reducing the alert severity will not result in a corresponding decrease in the incident priority.
