To keep its user base as informed as possible, OIT makes public any interruption, change, or degradation of any service that it provides. the IT Service Portal’s system status page is the core method of communicating these deviations of service. All outages and service degradations, planned or unplanned, will be reported by creating outages that will appear on the IT Service Portal.  OIT Service Owners should still include and use other communication methods that have been pre-established with the users and customers of those services.

Types of Outage posts

Planned Maintenance

A scheduled maintenance event that may temporarily render a service unavailable (or available at diminished capacity). This type of outage record must always be associated with a change record, but not all change records require a planned maintenance outage.

Outage

An unplanned disruption that prevents users from using a service or makes a service inaccessible. This type of outage must always be associated with an incident record, but not all incidents require an outage. If an incident does not affect usability, an outage may not be necessary.

Degradation

An unplanned disruption that renders a service only partially usable or at operable but reduced capacity. An incident must always be associated with this type of outage.

Follow-up posts

• Update an outage post regularly until the issue is resolved, even if no new information is available.
  The definition of “regular” depends on the service and the impact, but hourly is a good baseline.
• Include the expected frequency of updates if known.
• Do not include an estimate on service recovery unless it is relatively certain.
• Staff members are encouraged to use the NC State Help Desk for updating, as it both frees technical staff from updates and makes the Help Desk aware of the current situation.
• Submit a final post when the service has returned to normal status.

How to make a post

View the ServiceNow knowledge article on Creating an Outage.

Who can post?

Licensed users with the ITIL Role in ServiceNow can post or update outages.

Help

• If you need help, the NC State Help Desk can help you create or update an outage post during normal business hours.