What are the severity levels and how do I know which one to use?

Answer

Many clients on Blueworks Live are using inappropriate severity levels for their ticket submissions.

It is critical that you use the appropriate severity level. Not only for measurement and metrics purposes on our end but also that your ticket be given the correct priority.

Some have used a Sev 1 simply to ask what browsers do we support when that topic is clearly defined in our knowledge base. It leads to support correcting the client sev level.

NOTE: Support reserves the right to correct a user misentered sev level.

The following definitions are from Parature and Blueworks Live.

Severity Level 1? Critical Impact or Service Down

Business critical functionality is inoperative or critical interface failed. It applies to the production environment (your environment) and indicates an inability to access services due to a malfunction that led to a server crash. A Sev 1 is restricted to ONLY a server crash. You know that the server is down because when you try to log on you are not been able to and the system displays a 500 HTTP error code. If a sev 1 is used for any other purpose Support reserves the right to correct the client severity level.

Severity Level 2? Significant Business Impact

A service? A major feature or a function of a service is restricted in its use. Take, for example Publishing. If you cannot Publish a process diagram, then you cannot have it reviewed by your Contributors or Viewed by your Viewers. So if you are an insurance company that provides underwriting services at a client site then your field agents? being Viewers? would not be ale to view the process. This would be business critical.

Severity Level 3? Minor Business Impact

Indicates that the function or service is usable and there is not a critical impact on operations. What it says is this:

All your functions are there for you to use and they all work as designed. However, you can be confused as to their use. For Example: Ho do I use two starting points to develop a parallel flow process that terminates simultaneously at a decision point and then ends at one end point?

All issues of how do I do something? are Sev 3.

Severity Level 4? A nontechnical request or inquiry

It is for questions such as

- What browsers do you support?

- When are you having your next release.

- Have my enhancement requests been submitted?

- Why haven't I received my billing invoice?

Any questions that are general in nature is a Sev 4.