Five people, one problem
At nine o'clock the service desk gets a phone call, two emails, a text and a chat message. All five say the same thing: the shop website is down.
Without a plan, five technicians start five different fixes. With a plan, one ticket is made and everybody works from it.
By the end of this lesson
Note
I can say how an incident is identified and what a good log entry holds.
Key words
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Incident | something that harms or could harm a service or its data |
| Event | anything that happens on a system, good or bad |
| Log | a record of what happened and when |
| Ticket | one record that follows an incident from start to finish |
| Service desk | the people users contact when something goes wrong |
| Monitoring system | software that watches a system and raises alerts by itself |
| Network | computers joined together so they can share data |
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 can arrive by many routes
Somebody has to notice the problem first. This is identification.
A person can tell you: a call or a text to the service desk, an email, or a live chat message. Or a machine can tell you: a monitoring system sends an alert.
Every route leads to the same place: a log entry.
Logging: write it down at once
A manual log entry is written by a person, often by raising a ticket. It holds three facts: the contact details of the person raising it, the date and time, and a description.
An automatic log entry is written by a monitoring system. It holds two facts: the date and time, and a description. A machine has no phone number to give.
Manual and automatic log entries
| Fact | Manual entry | Automatic entry |
|---|---|---|
| Contact details of who raised it | Yes | No |
| Date and time of the incident | Yes | Yes |
| Description of the incident | 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.