Luke Bruce-Smith

Yep, that is along the lines of what I have just implemented. Thanks so much! Very helpful.

Thanks for your reply @...

The workflow would be along the lines of...

a. Scheduled outage becomes necessary.

b. Plan the schedule change / risk assess / change management etc. All the usual stuff that takes place.

c. For Job management and notifications, we would like to have pre-formatted templates which relate to each known outage type that we may have. For example, if we take a server or a NAS offline, we knows it will affect a series of drive maps (which relates to the user), E.g Z: drive may relate to a certain user base, Y: Drive might relate to another user base.

By having these templates for outages set up, there is less likelihood of the administrator forgetting to advise a certain user group of an outage which affects their applicable system. The template would serve as a checklist of sorts, for the administrator to communicate the outage to the applicable stakeholder groups but also to check / monitor each system as it is restored.

I do like the idea of comments coming in as private comments rather than going to all.

As we learn about the additional steps or notifications we need to apply as outages occur, we can maintain the templates / keep them up to date.

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks again.

Does anyone have experience using Zendesk for outage management?

We're looking for pre-formatted tickets or templates with a variety of the different (common) outages we may have. We can keep each template (ticket) up to date with a list of the systems that are affected for each type of outage and include the stakeholder parties on each template.

I'm just curious if anyone else has done anything like this and suggestions / ideas if using Zendesk for management of system outages (both scheduled and unscheduled).

Thanks.