Searching the Help
To search for information in the Help, type a word or phrase in the Search box. When you enter a group of words, OR is inferred. You can use Boolean operators to refine your search.
Results returned are case insensitive. However, results ranking takes case into account and assigns higher scores to case matches. Therefore, a search for "cats" followed by a search for "Cats" would return the same number of Help topics, but the order in which the topics are listed would be different.
Words and Phrases
| Search for | Example | Results |
|---|---|---|
| A single word | cat
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Topics that contain the word "cat". You will also find its grammatical variations, such as "cats". |
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A phrase. You can specify that the search results contain a specific phrase. |
"cat food" (quotation marks) |
Topics that contain the literal phrase "cat food" and all its grammatical variations. Without the quotation marks, the query is equivalent to specifying an OR operator, which finds topics with one of the individual words instead of the phrase. |
Using Boolean Operators
| Search for | Operator | Example |
|---|---|---|
|
Two or more words in the same topic |
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| Either word in a topic |
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| Topics that do not contain a specific word or phrase |
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| Topics that contain one string and do not contain another | ^ (caret) |
cat ^ mouse
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| A combination of search types | ( ) parentheses |
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Outages
An outage is a temporary loss of service of a Configuration Item. It can be the result of planned maintenance or operational failure.
Outage classes
Outages fall into different classifications:
- Planned (and approved) outages
- Degraded service
- Partial loss of service
- Slow response time
- Intermittent interruptions
- Total loss of service
Availability criteria should specify what the maximum outage threshold is on a monthly basis. For example, you can choose a metric based on the required percentage of up time, or the maximum time allowed for an outage, when you define an availability Service Level Target.
Planned outages
A planned outage is usually the result of a routine maintenance schedule, upgrade action, or faulty equipment replacement. Incidents, change requests, and change tasks can generate outage records. The change request and task records show scheduled downtime. Incident, change request, and change task records have a checkbox to specify if the Configuration Item is out of service.
Note Some planned outages may fall within pre-defined service windows when the outage does not count against availability metrics.
Calculating outage costs
When an outage occurs and the associated CI has an SLT, the outage costs to the business are calculated and stored in the outagedetail records. You can configure the default Outage Cost per Hour in the Configuration Management Environment record. The default Outage Cost per Hour is only applied if you do not specify Outage Cost per Hour in the CI form.
Related topics
Service Level Management
Working with service agreements
Operational Level Agreements
Service Level Agreement components
Service agreement selection process
Automatic outage posting
Outage spreading
Outage posting in other applications
Service Level Agreement performance and reporting
Related topics
Enable automatic outage posting
Disable automatic outage posting
Enable outage spreading
Disable outage spreading
Change outage start and end times
