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Technical Assistance
Center

Technical Assistance Center Case Priority Management

In addition to case severity, BlueArc utilizes an internal Case Priority level to ensure proper attention and priority of customer cases. This priority level is set by BlueArc Global Services and is used to prioritize case workload based on the importance of a case. Priority levels can be set to the following:

1) Hot-List

This is used when full corporate resources are required to help resolve a very critical customer issue, where time is of the essence. In addition, this is used to inform management of a particularly sensitive issue with an account that may have had a series of recent or historical issues. Hot-list does not necessarily relate to the severity level, but maybe due to the sensitive nature of the customer problem and/or relationship. A daily report is generated automatically and distributed to senior management.

2) Mgmt Escalation

This is used for cases that have been escalated to Global Services management. This signifies that either a customer or employee has requested management intervention and extra focus on the issue due to this being a top customer priority.

• High Used when severity is Down System or Critical and when it is of the utmost importance that the problem be resolved immediately. Generally, only used for customers who are in production and whose system is down or severely impaired. Implies that solving this task should be prioritized over all other tasks.
  
  
• Medium Indicates that the people involved in solving this case should prioritize this task relative to other tasks. This priority is used for cases where the issue prevents the customer from performing a task that is important to their business process or impacts the progress of their implementation project.
  
  
• Low Indicates that this task can be given a relatively low priority but still deserves attention. This priority is used for cases where the customer does not require a quick response to the inquiry.

 

Severity Levels

Severity levels define the state a system or software application is in when it is not functioning as designed. The Severity level correlates to the Priority level associated to the state of the problem.

Severity: Level 1 System Down
Priority 1 Hot List or Priority 2 Management Escalation

Emergency-Down System Severity level 1 represents an emergency condition, which makes the use or continued use of any one or more functions impossible, or if customer Data has become completely inaccessible, severely impacting customer production/operations. The condition requires an immediate solution that is not already available. Response time target is immediate.

EXAMPLE: When a customer loses access to their data for any reason, this is a severity 1 = Emergency-Down System. A crash or reset is typical here. Even if the system comes right back up, the customer still had no access to their data. We need to report on this outage with a Severity 1.

Severity: Level 2 Critical Partially Down
Priority: 3 High

Critical Severity level 2 represents a condition which makes the use (or continued use) of any one or more functions difficult, and the condition cannot be remedied on a temporary basis (workaround). Data may be accessible, but accessibility could be sporadic, or performance reduced to a point of impacting production/mission critical data. Response time target is 1 hour.

EXAMPLE: When a customer loses partial use of their system for any reason, this is a severity 2 = Critical. This might be one of their heads went down, one of 2 switches is bad or system performance is extremely poor. All data is still accessible.

Severity: Level 3 Major Impact
Priority 4: Medium

Major Impact Severity level 3 represents a reproducible limited problem condition, which is not critical in that no loss of data or data access occurs and which may be circumvented or avoided on a temporary basis (workaround). Response time target is 2 hours.

EXAMPLE: Performance issue, Backups not working, certain functions or commands aren't working making it difficult to perform a task.

Severity: Level 4 Minor Impact
Priority 5: Low

Minor Impact Severity level 4 represents minor problem conditions or documentation errors, which are easily avoided or circumvented by the customer. Additional request for new feature suggestions, which are defined as new functionality in existing Product are also classified as Severity level 4. Response time target is 4 hours.

NOTE: Problems are separated into several severity levels depending upon the availability of the system and the overall impact to business performance. If there is ever a dispute about the severity of a given situation, the customer will make the final determination.