The overnight data load fails
At 8 am the sales screen shows last week's figures. The night load of new data never finished. The phones at the help desk start ringing.
The team must act fast, but not in a panic. Support teams have a standard way to handle events like this. It is called incident management.
By the end of this lesson
Note
I can describe how an incident is handled from first report to lessons shared.
Key words
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Incident | One unplanned event that disrupts a service and lowers its quality |
| Problem | The cause of an incident |
| Incident management | The steps a team follows to deal with an incident |
| Detection | Finding out an incident has happened |
| Response | Acting to fix the incident |
| Intelligence | Learning from the incident |
| Owner | The person in charge of one incident |
| Dashboard | A screen that shows the main figures |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
Starter
Have a go
Starter
3 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.
An incident is one unplanned event
An incident has three parts. It is a single event. It is unplanned. It disrupts a service and lowers its quality.
A planned shutdown at midnight is not an incident. The sales load failing at 2 am is.
A problem is the cause
In incident management, a problem is the cause of an incident. This is a special meaning of the word.
The incident is "the dashboard shows old figures". The problem is "the load ran out of disk space". Fixing the incident restores service. Fixing the problem stops it happening again.
Is it an incident?
| Event | Unplanned? | Disrupts service? | Incident? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Night data load fails | yes | yes | yes |
| Dashboard turned off at midnight for an update | no | yes | no |
| A user forgets a password and asks for help | yes | only for one person | no, a simple request |
| Every report shows blank totals | yes | yes | yes |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
Check
Have a go
Check
3 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.