Service Levels

We have several service levels, which have priorities associated with them. Understanding these service levels and their priorities will help you understand why some jobs are not addressed immediately.

• Emergency
• High
• Normal
• Low
• On Hold
• Scheduled Request
• Scheduled Outage

Emergency - Core Service Outage

An emergency is an unscheduled outage affecting everyone in Chemistry, in that some core service we offer is completely unavailable. These situations are fortunately rare, but when they occur, the primary and/or secondary contact for the affected service will drop whatever they are working on to attend to this emergency within ten minutes of notification of that contact. They will not return to the previous task until the emergency situation is resolved. This is the only category that warrants IT staff returning to work outside normal business hours.
Response time outside normal business hours will vary depending on qualified staff availability. See our Hours of Operation page for details.
Examples:

• Full Departmental network outage
• Email server failing to answer SMTP, POP, ICMP ping requests
• Webserver not serving any pages

High - Individual Work Stoppage

High priority requests are those that cause a complete work stoppage for a single person. A primary or secondary contact will be dispatched within one hour of notification within normal business hours. We will keep you apprised of progress via the Help Desk package or by phone, if the outage causes you to have no access to the Help Desk or your email and if the outage is protracted (having to order a replacement part, etc.)
Examples:

• complete failure of system hard drive
• complete monitor failure
• loss of network access on all protocols (Web, email, printing, file shares)

Normal - Partial Service Outage

Normal requests are those affecting a partial service, a portion of the network, or some portion of an individual's workstation. During normal business hours, our response time will be two hours.
Examples:

• FTP on the web server fails, allowing web access to continue but fails to allow the uploading of new content.
• The Departmental print server fails, allowing all services to be accessed by a computer except for printing.
• A UNIX/Linux workstation's SSH daemon fails, allowing applications to run locally, but remote access to the computer via ssh is denied.

Low - General Priority Service Request

Low priority requests are those with no schedule, such as installation of new computers, replacement of non-critical computer parts (e.g., sound card, CD-ROM drive), and installation of new versions of software We will attempt to complete these jobs in ten working days. Progress reports will be made through the Help Desk.

Scheduled Service Request

Service requests can be scheduled to the mutual convenience of the requestor and the technician.
Examples:

• Relocation of a computer
• Advice on purchasing new computers
• Booking time on the Macintosh CD-R station

Scheduled Service Outage

Planned outages of services for maintenance or upgrades will be scheduled at least 48 hours in advance, and posted on our website as well as on the Help Desk.