Alerts and escalation

There are several ways of providing alerts and escalations in Service Manager:

1. Notifications: Service Manager provides a broad and deep solution to deliver notifications to incident stakeholders whenever the incident is opened, updated or closed. Administrators have complete control of the following areas in the notification engine:

   1. The notification vehicle (email, page, etc) and format

   2. The conditions on which the notification is sent

   3. The receiver of the notification

2. Alerts: The administrator can configure alerts in the incident workflow and SLM targets. When these targets are met, specified users receive alerts and notifications.

3. Escalation: The Escalated option in an incident record allows you to mark an incident for escalation. Once you select this option, you must specify an appropriate incident manager. After you save the incident, the incident manager and the incident assignee will then receive a notification about this escalated incident.

4. Service Level monitoring: Alerts and escalations can be triggered through evaluation of service levels as defined in the Service Level Management module. This approach is used to set Service Level Targets and Service Level Agreements with associated actions should service levels approach breach conditions. In this way, escalation is accomplished proactively to avoid breach rather than react to breach.

Incident escalation: Functional escalation

Service Manager includes pre-defined workflows reflecting Micro Focus's best practices based on ITIL 2011 guidance. These best practices come from Micro Focus's professional services organization and are developed through working with some of the Micro Focus's primary partner companies.

By default, Incidents are assigned to the service desk for acceptance as an Incident and assignment to the appropriate group.

Based on customer process requirements, assignment can be automated. Service Manager can be configured to automatically define record assignment based on values in any of the Incident record fields.

For example, escalations can be defined in the category record associated with an incident record or in SLAs that are applied to the record. Escalations include notifications and alerts (as the record passes through escalation levels). Service Manager can send alerts to different users, managers, and IT staff as the record is escalated.

SRC Support Catalog also allows automatic opening and routing of Incident records based on pre-defined categories and items.