Alerts and escalation

Incident Management can escalate an Incident record automatically when no one updates the record within a specified time. An alert process triggers the escalation and sends a message that an Incident record is not resolved. Escalation is the process of advancing through the alert stages. Service Manager has the following alert stages:

• Alert Stage 1
• Alert Stage 2
• Alert Stage 3
• DEADLINE ALERT

Each category record specifies a time interval for each alert stage. An unresolved Incident record reaches the next alert stage if no one updates the record after the specified time. When someone updates an Incident record that is in Alert Stage 1, 2, or 3, the alert status resets and the next stage becomes Alert Stage 1. The DEADLINE ALERT stage is always scheduled for a fixed interval after the opening of the Incident record. When an Incident record reaches the DEADLINE ALERT stage, it remains at this stage and the update to the record cannot reset the alert stage until the Incident record is resolved.

The following list describes different users who might be notified when an Incident record escalates:

• All contacts in the current contact list for the Assignment Group (except the manager)
• The user who opened the Incident record
• The current primary contact in the owner group
• The current manager of the Assignment Group
• The current manager of the owner group
• The service level manager and client manager of the company and department specified in the Incident record

Alerts and calendars

The clocks that manage alerts do not need to run on a 24-hour schedule. By default, all alert clocks run on a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week schedule. However, you can override the 24-hour schedule with a different calendar for a Deadline Alert group that is available fewer hours a day, or fewer days a week. Then the alert clocks for that group run only during the duty hours defined by the associated calendar. For example, if your employees work from 9 am to 5 pm, you can set the alert clocks to run only during these hours.

Reassignment alert groups

Each time a user reassigns an incident, Incident Management updates that incident. When an update occurs, there is no escalation triggered, even if there is no progress to resolve the incident. Therefore, it is possible to reassign an incident without resolving it. Incident Management enables you to set a threshold limit on the number of times an incident can be reassigned in the category record. When this threshold is reached, Incident Management notifies the Reassignment Alert group.

When an incident is reassigned, the assignment profile context changes. If an incident is reassigned to an assignment group on Alert Stage 2, the reassignment on Alert Stage 3 depends on the assignment profile definition of the group that received the incident in the previous escalation.

Related topics

Incident Management overview
Incident Management administrator tasks
Incident Management summary link records
Incident Management contract management records
Incident Management and service level agreements