Major Incident
Overview
A Major Incident is a high-impact incident that causes significant disruption to business operations or IT services and requires an urgent, coordinated response. Starting with Enterprise Service Management v. 25.4, the end-to-end support for Major Incident handling improves visibility, coordination, and communication to the end-users of the Self Service Portal via Service Availability Center.
Key particularities and processing flow:
- Incident Creation: an incident is created by a user, system integration, or automated detection.
- Major Incident Proposal: an agent can propose the incident as a Major Incident. Alternatively, Matrix42 Intelligence may predict it as a Major Incident, if the AI Proposals for Service Desk extension is installed.
- Incident Manager Decision: the Incident Manager reviews the proposal and either accepts (promotes) or rejects it. The manager can also escalate or de-escalate an incident directly.
- Confirmation and Communication: once confirmed and published to the Service Availability Center (SAC), the Incident Manager sets the public status and message.
- Notification and Tracking: subscribers are notified of changes in service health status via Service Availability Center. Ongoing progress is tracked and remains visible through filters, Service Desk Home page metrics and reports in Service Desk and Service Catalog.
The feature is available in New Look only.
Service Availability Center Configuration
Service Availability Center (SAC) is a page in the Self Service Portal that provides end users with a central view of service health status, related Major Incidents or Change Requests, maintenance information, and communication details.
Only simple Services that are marked as Included in Service Availability Center are visible here:
Activating Service Availability Center
The Service Availability Center must be activated under Service Catalog → System Settings → Activate Service Availability Center.
When the checkbox is enabled, the Service Availability Center appears in the Self Service Portal.
Adding Services to the SAC
Only Simple Services that were specifically set up to appear in the Service Availability Center (SAC) will be shown in the Service Status Report section.
Combined Services, like Bundles, Groups, and Sets do not appear in the SAC.
To show the Service in the SAC, select the Include Service in Service Availability Center checkbox via:
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Service settings page: select the Include Service in Service Availability Center checkbox via Service Catalog → Service Portfolio → search for the necessary Service → Edit → General settings.
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Major Incident: when a Major Incident is confirmed in the Service Desk, the manager decides whether it should be communicated in the Service Availability Center and defines the communication text to avoid disclosure of sensitive details. The Service can be included and added to the SAC via the following actions related to the Major Incident management process:
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Accept Proposal (Incidents)
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Escalate to Major Incident (Incidents)
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Add to Service Availability Center (Incidents and Change Requests)
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When the Include Service in Service Availability Center checkbox is enabled through the service settings or one of the mentioned actions, the Service appears as a service card in the Service Status Report section of the Service Availability Center.
Removing Services from the SAC
To remove the Service displaying in the SAC, disable the Include Service in Service Availability Center checkbox via Service Catalog → Service Portfolio → search for the necessary Service → Edit → General settings.
Notifications upon Service Health Status Change
Any user can subscribe or unsubscribe to Health Status changes of the Services they want to be informed of. When the Health Status is changed, subscribers get an email about it:
SAC: Updates on Service Health Status changes email example
The Health Status can be changed via:
- Service edit dialog → Dependencies → Health status or via actions related to the Major Incident management process.
- Accept Proposal action
- Escalate to Major Incident action
- De-escalate to Standard Incident action
To adjust the standard email, the system Administrator can edit the Inform Users about subscribed service health status change Email Descriptor in the Administration application.
Major Incident Proposal Process
Any Incident in the Service Desk can be converted to a Major Incident Proposal by a Service Desk agent through Propose Major Incident action.
To Propose Major Incident:
- In the Service Desk → Incidents → search for the necessary incident
- Right-click the incident in the grid to open the available actions panel, or click on the incident to open a preview with the available actions panel
- Click the Propose Major Incident to run the wizard.
- In the wizard, the agent can optionally provide an Affected Service, if not provided in the Incident yet, and add a comment, which will be later visible in the Journal entry of the Incident:
Incident Management members are getting notified by email about a new Major Incident proposal and can Accept (promote to Major Incident) or Reject the proposal, using Accept Proposal or Reject Proposal actions in Incident preview:
The pending requests are also displayed in the Active Major Incident Proposals widget of the Service Desk Home Dashboard.
Accept Proposal
By default, only users with the Incident Management role can Accept Proposal.
The Accept Proposal action additionally allows adding the Incident to the Service Availability Center by selecting the checkbox:
- Disabled (default): after applying Accept Proposal, the Incident will be marked as a Major Incident in the Incidents grid.
In case Major Incident was not added to be visible in the Service Availability Center, Incident Managers can use Add to Service Availability Center action to do so later.
- Enabled: select the checkbox and fill out the suggested fields to specify if only the Incident-related information should be displayed in the SAC, or also the Affected Service
- Communication Title: auto-prefilled from the ticket summary. Adjust the message that will be shown for this service in the Service Availability Center.
- Affected Service: is pre-filled if the affected service was already specified, or you can assign a simple service from the available options in the system.
- Change Health Status to:
- Partial Outage (default)
- Maintenance
- Major Outage
- Operational
- Include Service in Service Availability Center: in case the selected simple Service is not added to be monitored in the Service Availability Center yet, the user will be notified about it with the following warning:
Selected Service is not visible in Service Availability Center
Accept Proposal action wizard example
Select the Include Service in Service Availability Center checkbox to display the Affected Service in the Service Status Report section of the SAC. Only Simple Services can be shown in the Service Availability Center dashboard. Bundles, Groups, and Sets are not displayed on this dashboard.
Ensure the Service Availability Center is enabled by selecting the Activate Service Availability Center checkbox in the Service Catalog system settings.
Click Accept Proposal.
As a result:
- Incident is raised to Major Incident
- Incidents and Maintenance section of the SAC displays the Affected Service name and communication title (if displaying was enabled)
- Service Status Report section of SAC displays the Affected Service (if displaying was enabled)
See also, Service Availability Center (SAC)
Reject Proposal
By default, only users with the Incident Management role can Reject Proposal.
After the Incident was proposed as a Major Incident, another action in the Incident preview is Reject Proposal:
Click Reject Proposal to confirm the action. The Incident remains a standard incident.
Escalate to Major Incident
If the Incident was already rejected once, the Propose Major Incident action is no longer available. However, Incident Managers are still able to escalate an Incident to Major via a separate Escalate to Major Incident action:
This action allows specifying the same data as the Accept Proposal action.
Only Simple Services can be shown in the Service Availability Center dashboard. Bundles, Groups, and Sets are not displayed on this dashboard.
To make the service visible in the Service Availability Center, enable the Include Service in Service Availability Center checkbox.
De-escalate to Standard Incident
Incident Managers are able to use De-escalate to Standard Incident action to revert the Incident from Major.
As a result, the Incident will no longer be visible in the Service Availability Center, all related Communications will be removed, and the Health Status of the Affected Service will be set back to Operational. Although the Service will still be displayed in the Service Status Report section of the Service Availability Center.
Related actions
Add to Service Availability Center
In case a Major Incident was not added to be visible in the Service Availability Center with the Accept Proposal action, Incident Managers can use the Add to Service Availability Center action to do so later. Specify the Communication Title and the Affected Service in the suggested wizard:
Only Simple Services can be shown in the Service Availability Center dashboard. Bundles, Groups, and Sets are not displayed on this dashboard.
To make the service visible in the Service Availability Center, enable the Include Service in Service Availability Center checkbox.
Remove from Service Availability Center
In case a Major Incident should stay major, but be invisible in the Service Availability Center, Incident Managers can use Remove from Service Availability Center action to do so. The result is the same as after running De-escalate to Standard Incident action, but the Incident remains a Major.
Only Incident-related data is removed from the Incidents and Maintenance section of the Service Availability Center. The Service with status Operational will still be displayed in the Service Status Report section of the SAC.
Major Incident displaying and filtering
Incidents
The Incident will be marked as a Major Incident in the Incidents grid as follows:
Incident Preview
The Incident preview additionally highlights the Major Incident as follows:
Edit Incident Dialog: Communication
As soon as a Major Incident is added to the Service Availability Center, an additional Communication tab is shown in the edit Incident dialog:
Here are collected, added, and managed all the updates regarding the progress and status. It is possible to edit previous communications, remove them, or update the Communication Title that was added in the wizard before.
All Communications are visible in the Service Availability Center to the end users in the Self Service Portal when the Affected Service is monitored there as well.
Incident Search Filters
Built-in filters, which are predefined in the Incidents Dataset view, make searching for such Incidents much easier. The following filters were introduced:
- Major Incidents
- Major Incident Proposals
- Visible in Service Availability Center (SAC). See also, Service Availability Center.
The Visible in Service Availability Center filter is also available on the Change Requests page.
Service Desk Dashboards: Home
The following metric cards allow centralized preview and management of the pending and current Major Incidents:
- Active Major Incident Proposals
- Open Major Incidents
See also, Service Desk Dashboards: Home.
Service Health and Disruption Report
The Service Health and Disruption report, available in Service Catalog and Service Desk, provides visibility into the current state of service health, major incident activity, and related user engagement, including an early detection mechanism that supplements human and agent monitoring. The report evaluates how accurate and impactful the AI-driven proposals are, highlighting their conversion rate and trends.
See also, Service Health and Disruption Report.