Outage Severity Levels
Severity 1 (SEV-1):
SEV-1 events are when a production service is down, unable to use the service in the production environment, causing critical business impact, and no workaround is available. When reporting an incdent as SEV-1 in our Helpdesk ticketing system, this would be denoted by a priority of "Very High".
Severity 2 (SEV-2):
Serious problem that has a significant business or campus wide impact; use of the service is severely limited, but no production system is continuously down. SEV-2 problems include situations where clients are forced to restart processes frequently, and performance problems that cause significant degradation of service but do not render the product totally unusable. When reporting an incdent as SEV-2 in our Helpdesk ticketing system, this would be denoted by a priority of "High".
Severity 3 (SEV-3):
Problems that cause some business impact but that can be reasonably circumvented (a workaround is available); situations where there is a problem but the service is still usable. The default severity of new problem reports should be SEV-3. When reporting an incdent as SEV-3 in our Helpdesk ticketing system, this would be denoted by a priority of "Medium".
Severity 4 (sev-4): Minor problems that have limited impact on business or non-critical loss of functionality of the service. When reporting an incdent as SEV-1 in our Helpdesk ticketing system, this would be denoted by a priority of "Low".