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 Incident Management module includes the ability to set criteria for the generation of alerts. For example, the administrator can set rules for three stages of alert and a deadline condition. When these targets are met, specified users receive alerts and notifications through the Service Manager tool, email, pager, or fax etc.

3. Escalations: Business rules can be used to trigger automated escalations of records under various conditions. For example, the following conditions:

   • The status of a record remains unchanged for a long time
   • A record has been reassigned too often between assignment groups

   In addition, to document the violation of these rules the administrator can configure Service Manager to act in certain ways should these rules be breached. For example, reassign the record to the assignee's manager if a record remains in the Open state for too long.

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.