Major incidents and duplicates

What a major incident is

An incident with a big impact on the business, such as email being down for everyone. Many people report it, and each report is a case. ITIL calls for one incident to manage the outage, with the reports linked to it.

Run a major incident

1. Open the first case about the outage and set Major Incident to Yes. It appears in Cases > Open Major Incidents, and in Teams if Teams alerts are on.
2. On each other report, set Parent Case to the major incident. They show under Related cases on it.
3. Keep customers updated from the major incident.
4. When it is fixed, Resolve Case on the major incident. Within a minute every open linked case is resolved too, with the same resolution type and "Resolved with major incident CS-…" and its resolution, so each customer hears the outcome on their own case.

Merge a duplicate

The same customer raised the same thing twice? On the duplicate, select Merge into Another Case and choose the case to keep. The duplicate is cancelled as a Duplicate with the kept case as its parent, and the customer's later replies to it go on to the kept case.

Rules that keep it tidy

• A case cannot be its own parent, or the parent of its own parent.
• Repeat incidents with a cause still to find belong in a Problem. See Problems and service requests.