A major incident (MI) is an incident that results in significant disruption to the business. A major incident demands a response beyond the routine incident management process. Major incidents have a separate procedure with shorter timescales and higher priority, so that there is a faster resolution process for incidents with high business impact.

The definition of what constitutes a major incident must be determined and agreed on. For example, a major incident can be created if a critical business service is impacted or if there is a service outage that affects many users.

There are multiple ways to create a major incident candidate, such as the following:
  • Propose an incident as a major incident candidate by clicking Propose Major Incident from the context menu of the Incident form.
  • Create a new major incident candidate by clicking Create Major Incident Candidate from the left navigation pane.
  • Mark an incident as a major incident candidate based on the major incident trigger rules.
Note: When a major incident is created from a major incident candidate, the new major incident is considered as a parent record for the current major incident candidate. In such case, the Caller and Company fields are optional.
As a major incident manager, you can do the following:
  • Promote a candidate to a major incident by clicking Promote to Major Incident from the context menu.
  • Create a new major incident by clicking Create Major Incident from the left navigation pane.
  • Promote an incident to a major incident without going through the proposal process.

When responding to a major incident, some crucial actions involve finding the right resources, communicating updates to users and stakeholders, setting up conference calls to investigate and resolve the incident, and escalating the incident when required. Using Task Communications Management, you can define communication plans that are associated with a major incident based on pre-defined conditions. Incident communication plans and related communication tasks are created for a major incident based on the communication plan definitions. Thereafter, tasks get executed as defined in the attached incident communication.