Criticality and Impact Analysis

Using Configuration Item Criticality to drive SLA priority

LiveTime Supervisors are well aware that the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is at the heart of all LiveTime installations. Its central role is vital in providing high quality service management. The CMDB provides the blueprint of the organization’s IT infrastructure. 

The infrastructure consists of individual items – hardware, software, services, documentation – whose relationships can be mapped within the CMDB and, if planned from a service perspective, related to business functions that the organization offers. 

Each Item, or in ITIL terminology, Configuration Item (CI), has configurable attributes and data types to which corresponding values can be applied. The definition of these attributes occurs at the Category level of the CMDB. 

Configuration Item Criticality

The Criticality field, located on the Item Information tab, is used to identify the importance of an Item relative to its role within the organization. When the Incident Priority is set to Derived (Admin > Setup > Privileges > Requests), the criticality drives the impact on any underlying service request. 

The priority of the request is subsequently derived from the request impact and urgency which determines the approriate SLA priority for the selected agreement. If required, the Impact can be overridden on the Request Summary screen. 

Since many Customers rate most of their requests as urgent, using derived priority ensures that each request is assessed relative to the Item’s importance within the organization. Similarly, Customer requests that are logged through the LiveTime Customer Portal apply the Item Criticality to determine the Priority of the request. The Technician servicing the request can adjust the Priority as appropriate. 

Table 1.0 displays the calculations used by LiveTime when the Item Criticality is mapped to a request’s Impact, which is then combined with the request’s Urgency to derive the importance or Priority of the request:

Table 1: Impact and Urgency

These calculations result in the request being assigned the Priority level as displayed in Table 1.1:

Table 1.1: SLA priority

LiveTime’s ability to calculate the Priority ensures adequate resources are allocated to every request relative to the importance of the underlying infrastructure or service. The time taken to set the Criticality levels of Items within the CMDB is time well spent, as it gives support personnel a clear indication of the Impact of a service request from the moment it is logged.