Defining advanced impacted areas for incidents

As a service desk agent, you can define enhanced impacted areas for an incident to capture comprehensive details of the incident. You can capture operational, business, and financial impact areas in addition to the location impact area of an incident.

When you create a new impacted area record, its status is set to Draft, and you can send it for review. A notification is automatically sent to the reviewer by using the default Incident Impacted Areas notification template. The Assigned Group and Owner Group are the default reviewers and recipients of the notification. The reviewers can assess the incident impact and then validate it.

If you want to create multiple impacted area records, you can import them by using an .xls or .xlsx file. A worklog is added for successful or failed imports. You can view the error records, rectify the records, and reimport them.

Before you begin

You must have write access to an incident to create advanced impacted area records for that incident.

To add an impacted area record to an incident

Open an incident.
On the incident details page, select More > Impacted areas.

The Impacted areas console opens in a new tab.
On the Impacted areas tab, click + Impacted area.

On the Create impacted area page, specify the following details:

Field	Description
Assessment status	By default, the status is set to Draft. If you don't want to set a status, select None. If the impact is validated, select Impact validated.
Impact summary	Add a brief description of the impact.
Business impact
Impact type	Select if the impact of the incident is Financial or Non-financial. Tip: If you select Financial, specify additional details in the Financial impact section.
Impact level	Select the level of the impact: High Low Medium
Users affected	Specify the number of users affected by the incident.
Service availability	Select the extent of service impact caused by the incident. Complete outage: The service is completely unavailable, having a widespread business impact. No users can access the service, resulting in a total loss of functionality. Use this condition for a high-priority incident. Partial degradation: The service is partially available. Some users, functions, or components are impacted, while others continue to operate normally. Core services might still be accessible, but with reduced functionality or limited scope. Performance issue: The service is available but might be operating below acceptable performance levels. Users might be experiencing slowness, latency, or intermittent delays, but the service remains functional. These issues might still impact SLAs if performance thresholds are breached.
Duration of impact (in hours)	Specify the number of hours for which the service is impacted.
User type	Select the types of users that are affected by the incident: External customers Internal employees Partners Vendors
Location affected
Company (Required)	Select the company for which the impact is being created. Based on the selected company, the subsequent options are populated for the location fields.
Region	Select the Region of the company that is affected by the incident.
Site group	Select the Site group that is affected by the incident.
Site	Select the Site that is affected by the incident.
Business unit	Select the Business unit that is affected by the incident.
Department	Select the Department that is affected by the incident.
Operational impact
SLA breach risk	If the incident poses a breach risk for the predefined SLAs, enable the SLA breach risk toggle.
Compliance risk	If the incident is a compliance risk, enable the Compliance risk toggle.
Reputational impact	Select the level of impact on the reputation of the company: High Low Medium None
Compliance impact	Select the types of compliance that might be at risk due to the incident: GDPR HIPAA ISO 27001 Other PCI SOC2 SOX
Financial impact
Currency	Select the currency of the financial impact.
Estimated cost	Specify the approximate cost that a company might incur due to the incident.
Revenue loss	Specify the revenue loss that a company might incur due to the incident.

Click Save.

To send an impacted area record for review

Open an incident.
On the incident details page, select More > Impacted areas.
In the Impacted areas console, select a Draft impacted area record.
Click Send for review.
A notification is sent to the reviewer to review the record.

To delete a Draft impacted area record

Open an incident.
On the incident details page, select More > Impacted areas.
You can delete only Draft impacted area records. You cannot delete the records with the Impact validated status.
In the Impacted areas console, select a Draft impacted area record.
To confirm the deletion, click Yes.

To validate an impacted area record

Open an incident.
On the incident details page, select More > Impacted areas.
In the Impacted areas console, select a Draft impacted area record.
Click Validate.
The status of the impacted area record changes to Impact validated.

To bulk import impacted area records

Open an incident.
On the incident details page, select More > Impacted areas.
In the Impacted areas console, click the Import impacted areas tab.
To download the sample file, click the Sample HPD_Impacted Areas.xlsx file.
Click Download and save the file.
Specify the details for the impacted areas in the downloaded file, and save it.
The columns in the file correspond to the fields that are to be filled when you create a single impacted area. For more details, see Impacted area fields.
On the Import impacted areas tab, click Attach file.
Click Import.

The import job is displayed in the table.
To view errors that might have occurred during the import, click Error records.

Examples

At Apex Global, an outage in the customer payment portal delays confirmations for external customers. Carl, a service desk agent, opens View Impacted Areas and records Impact Type, Impact Level, User Type, Service Availability, and an impact summary so stakeholders can assess the scope of the issue. He also sends the impacted areas for review to the necessary stakeholders. After review, Carl validates the impacted area records so the entries cannot be changed, and the incident review is based on consistent data. Carl could assess the impact and resolve the issue quickly.
At Apex Global, a regional network incident impacts multiple sites and departments. Mary, a service desk agent, uploads impacted areas from an XLSX template. Some rows fail due to missing values, so Mary updates the failed rows and reprocesses them to complete the impacted area list. Mary reviews and validates the impact, and fixes the regional network issue quickly.