What is a Major Incident?  

A major incident is an emerging or ongoing outage or degradation of a core or critical production service https://4help.vt.edu/sys_report_display.do?sysparm_report_id=07da7276dbdbec106ee1d2cb4b96195a which significantly disrupts university/business operations. In order to declare a Major Incident, it must be a core or critical service. 

The goal of declaring a Major Incident is to:

• Restore core/critical production services to normal operations as soon as possible.
• Inform stakeholders of core/critical production service outages or degradations.
• Support activities to identify cause of issues and review organizational response through after-action reviews.

For more information, see:  https://4help.vt.edu/sp?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0012498 

To report a potential Major Incident, you can call 4Help, 24x7, 365 days, by dialing (540) 231-4357. 

You can also report a potential Major Incident using ServiceNow, from an existing incident:  

1. Open the incident record you want to propose as a major incident
2. Change the Short Description field to preface the Short Description to “Proposed Major Incident”
3. Click on the hamburger icon () and  and click Propose Major Incident
4. In the Work notes field in the Propose Major Incident dialog box, provide information about the business impact that supports classifying this incident as a major incident and click Propose.
5. The major incident state will change to Proposed and the message INCXXXXXXX has been proposed as a major incident candidate is displayed.
6. Call 4Help at (540)231-4357 to inform them a major incident has been proposed. 4Help will determine if the business service is a Core/Critical service and assess the impact and urgency of the incident, based on the number and/or priority of any incidents received, and contact the 4Help Manager on call and/or the Major Incident Manager if necessary. 

What happens after I propose a Major Incident? 

The 4Help agent will page the Major Incident Manager who will further evaluate the Proposed Major Incident, against current criteria, and will either accept and elevate the incident to a Major Incident or reject the proposal.