Handling Critical (Urgent) Priority Incidents

Purpose

This KBA provides details on the Critical (Urgent) Incident handling process, including guidelines for identifying, managing, and resolving high-priority software incidents to minimize impact on business operations.

Definition of Critical (Urgent) Priority Incidents

A Critical (Urgent) priority incident is classified as one that significantly impacts business operations, affecting critical systems or a large number of processes.
Examples include:

• System outages affecting production environments.

• Critical process failures that halt business processes.

Reporting a Critical (Urgent) priority incident

A Critical (Urgent) priority incident can be reported via the Support portal. To report a Critical (Urgent) Incident, make sure that you select the Business Impact: "Critical - The entire System is down" 


In addition please also provide details on the issue you experience with details on which environment is impacted, and what the kind of impact is. 

Support handling of Critical (Urgent) Incidents

After the generation of a Critical (Urgent) priority incident, support will:

• Review the Critical (Urgent) priority incident and acknowledge the creation of the ticket within the defined SLA (Link to Support guide)
  
  
• Set up a call or join a customer call - intended timeline within 15 to 30 minutes.
  • The support engineer will review the priority. If it is identified as a Critical (Urgent) priority incident, additional details will be collected.
    • If the Support engineer can resolve the incident, the issue will be closed.
    • If not, the incident will be escalated to the next Support Level.
      
      
  • In a general outage that affects multiple customers, this part of the process will be replaced by providing status updates via a KBA.
    The link to the KBA will be shared via the created ticket. 
    
    
• If a handover to the next support level is needed, the support engineer will join the call and provide details on the next steps. However, the support engineer might need to leave the call to analyze the information offline.
  The support engineer will inform you when the next update will be provided and when he/she will rejoin the call. 
  
  
• When the issue is resolved, either by resolving the issue or by providing a workaround, the support engineer will close the critical (Urgent) priority ticket.

Follow-up on  Critical (Urgent) Priority Incidents (RCA) 

As a follow-up on a Critical (Urgent) Priority, a Root Cause Analysis ticket may be created - upon request if you have the Standard or Professional Support Package. 

If the root cause was already known and provided at the closure of the critical (Urgent) priority incident or if it was not requested, this part of the procedure might not be executed. 

Escalation Process 

If you want to escalate the Critical (Urgent) Priority Incident to the management team at any time, please find the information/details here.