Determine the business impact

When you report a problem to IBM support you will be asked to supply a severity level. Therefore, you need to understand and assess the business impact of the problem you are reporting.

About this task

You must assign a severity level to the problem when you report it, so it is important to understand the business impact of the problem you are reporting. The following table displays the four different severity levels as defined by the Software Support Handbook.
Table 1. IBM Software Support severity levels
Level Description
Severity 1
  • Critical situation/System Down
  • Business critical software component is inoperable
  • Usually applies to production environment
  • Critical interface has failed
Examples:
  • All users of Tivoli Problem Management are unable to register a call
  • The Lotus Notes mail server is down and affecting all users.
Note: The IBM support team will work with you 7x24 to resolve critical problems help you in having a technical resource available to work during those hours.
Severity 2 A software component is severely restricted in its use, causing significant business impact.

Example: All users of Tivoli Problem Management receive a database manager error while attempting to view open problems

Severity 3 Moderate impact: A non-critical software component is malfunctioning, causing moderate business impact.

Example: A client cannot connect to a server

Severity 4 Minimal impact: A non-critical software component is malfunctioning, causing minimal impact, or a non-technical request is made.
Example:
  • Documentation is incorrect.
  • Additional documentation requested.