LEVERAGE Service Criticality Definitions
- EMERGENCY Incident: Emergency incidents will be defined as a system failure that has a critical business impact to the customer. The customer is responsible for defining whether or not the impact is critical in nature. If it is determined to be critical, it will be treated as such by LEVERAGE.
- URGENT Incident: Urgent incidents will be defined to be a fault that affects or threatens any major system component. Typically, such faults have a major impact on system performance, reliability, or user service levels and require the most prompt attention. For the telephony system and messaging system, this includes, but is not limited to, system processors (both hardware and software), local and remote concentrators/switches/nodes, internodal links and associated network equipment and circuitry, attendant consoles, call detail recording equipment, power supplies and battery backup, a fault in any equipment or software that causes loss or substantial deterioration of service to more than ten percent (10%) of the user lines or trunk circuits, loss of a majority of service in any one location, loss of any hardware or software component resulting in the loss of 25% or more lines in a single departmental, loss of any feature system-wide, loss of a trunk group, or a failure in redundantly configured hardware such that redundancy is not functional.
- ROUTINE Incidents and Other Service-Affecting Conditions: Routine incidents will be defined to be those that indicate a fault or matter requiring human intervention that does not fit into the category of an emergency or urgent incident as defined above. Other service-affecting conditions are those conditions that require maintenance or repair of a System component but do not provide an alarm indication and do not impact system performance or reliability to the extent of a major incident.
System Interruption Levels Defined
We typically define service interruption failures with some granularity with the intention of providing overall guidance. In order to provide this framework, we select some metrics that are appropriate to the customer environment, and use those metrics to determine how critical the interruption probably is, and based on that level of criticality, whether or not an emergent type of response is appropriate vs. a scheduled and pre-coordinated response.
What follows is our general criteria used to determine emergency, urgent, or routine types of service interruptions, and the expected response times based on those levels of interruption.
It should be noted that these levels and response times are certainly not set in stone, and are intended as guidelines. We recognize that there may be some outages that would not fall into the “Critical” level based on just the metrics provided, but perhaps one of the two devices that is affected is a critical location and has a significant operational impact. For those types of scenarios, we look to the customer to identify the interruption level as appropriate. If there are only two devices affected, but the customer identifies it as an “Emergency” outage, it shall be treated as such by LEVERAGE.
