ITIL compliance

Euladox Helpdesk IM helps you classify, prioritize and resolve issues faster, and follows ITIL incident management guidelines. This page explains the ITIL terms and shows which guidelines the product covers. It is for IT service desk managers. See Euladox Helpdesk IM for the product.

What is incident management?

Incident management handles all incidents: faults, bugs, failures or issues reported by users or customers by phone, email or a self-service portal, or found automatically by monitoring tools.

Its main goal is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and limit the harm to the business, so that service quality and availability stay at the best possible level. Here, normal service operation means operation within SLA limits.

What is an incident?

An incident is an unplanned interruption to an IT service, or a reduction in its quality. A broken printer or a PC that does not boot properly are incidents. So is the failure of a configuration item that has not yet affected service, such as one disk failing in a mirror set.

ITIL separates an incident from a service request. Service requests are standard requests from users, such as password resets. They are no longer handled by incident management but by a separate process called request fulfillment.

Benefits of incident management

• Lower unplanned cost for IT service staff, through fewer incident tickets
• Less downtime, with faster detection and resolution over time
• Higher productivity, because operations are restored quickly
• Better user satisfaction and less impact on the business and end users, with better monitoring
• Fewer lost incidents

How incidents are classified

Incidents need a priority, so they are classified by three things: impact (the scope of the effects), urgency (how fast the incident will start to have an effect) and timescales (based on the SLAs agreed between IT and the business).

Urgency

Level	Description
High	Damage increases rapidly. Work that staff cannot complete is highly time sensitive. Acting at once can stop a minor incident becoming major. Several VIP users are affected.
Medium	Damage increases considerably over time. A single VIP user is affected.
Low	Damage increases only marginally over time. Work that staff cannot complete is not time sensitive.

Impact

Level	Description
High	Many staff or customers are affected. The financial impact is likely to exceed $10,000 (for example). The damage to reputation is likely to be high. Someone has been injured.
Medium	A moderate number of staff or customers are affected. The financial impact is likely to be between $1,000 and $10,000 (for example). The damage to reputation is likely to be moderate.
Low	Few staff or customers are affected, and service is acceptable but needs extra effort. The financial impact is likely to be under $1,000 (for example). The damage to reputation is likely to be minimal.

Priority

Impact and urgency together set the priority of each incident, from 1 (highest) to 5.

Urgency / Impact	High	Medium	Low
High	1	2	3
Medium	2	3	4
Low	3	4	5

ITIL incident management features in Euladox Helpdesk IM

Euladox Helpdesk IM covers these ITIL incident management guidelines:

• Manual incident record creation
• Unique incident record
• Updates to the incident record with date and time stamp
• Employee or customer details recorded
• Recording of the incident description
• Tagging of assets to the incident
• Incident status
• Incident categorization and prioritization
• Manual priority override
• Incident assignment
• SLA-based escalation
• Recording of incident resolution and closure
• Native management reports, with no additional software to buy
• Audit trail of all activities on an incident
• Incident models with SLA thresholds
• User access to incident information and tracking
• Customer satisfaction survey

Because the service desk is linked to Euladox ITAM, assets can be tagged to each incident.