A help desk technician is reviewing four new tickets to assign a severity level to each. According to standard IT support best practices, which of the following tickets should be assigned the HIGHEST severity?
A printer in a break room is jammed, but other printers are available nearby.
A non-production test server is responding slowly during off-peak hours.
A single user's secondary monitor is flickering intermittently.
The company-wide payroll application is unavailable, and payroll processing is scheduled in two days.
Severity combines impact (how many users or critical business functions are affected) and urgency (how soon the issue must be resolved). A company-wide outage of the payroll system threatens a critical, time-sensitive business process that affects all employees, so it receives the highest severity. The other issues affect only a single user, a non-production environment, or have simple workarounds, which are all characteristics of low-severity tickets.
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What factors determine the severity of an IT support ticket?
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Why is a company-wide payroll system outage considered high-severity?
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What are examples of low-severity IT support tickets?