I don't understand the lifecycle of a Critical Incident

What is a the lifecycle of a Critical Incident?

Critical Incidents encompass issues which are blocking customers from completing their daily business processes. A Critical Incident response engages teams across SAP Ariba for resolution at the highest priority.

The lifecycle of a Critical Incident is composed of 4 phases as follows:

1. Issue Identified – An incident response team has been formed to evaluate several variables that are significant to issue resolution:

• Impact – The measure of disruption this issue has on various customer business operations or processes.
• Scope – The details around the extent of the issue. This can include be number of customers (potential), areas of the application, specific parts of the cloud/platform, etc.
• Timing – The timeline of when the issue was first observed or identified in logs/monitoring. Determining what variables could have contributed to this timeline.

With these details, a technical analysis will be performed to identify an action plan for resolution. During this time the team will evaluate possible short-term corrective actions to mitigate the impact or assemble additional resources to identify the root cause.

1. Issue Update

The incident response team is actively investigating the issue to identify the root cause. By pinpointing the exact cause, a proper short-term action plan can be established. The investigation includes using a variety of tools to review software code, system performance/error logs, configuration, infrastructure, recent changes, and several other variables that could be contributing to the issue.

During this time, if the root cause cannot be identified, SAP Ariba may attempt a series of corrective actions in parallel to mitigate the issue and allow a deeper investigation. Details of this investigation and actions taken will be communicated directly to customers via Cases, and/or additional notification channels at a regular cadence.

1. Issue Resolved

SAP Ariba implemented a corrective or preventative action to resolve the issue. The root cause should no longer occur moving forward and business operations can resume. At this time, reported Cases will be closed and SAP Ariba will begin the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) process. Once finalized, the RCA documentation can be downloaded directly from Systems & Provisioning > Availability in SAP for Me.

In the event that items or objects such as system data or documents were impacted during the incident SAP Ariba will develop an additional action plan to restore those items to the proper state. This level of information will be communicated directly to impacted customers and Cases will be closed once all actions have been verified.

1. Root Cause Available

At this stage, SAP Ariba has provided the RCA summary. All corrective and preventative actions are documented, implemented, or planned. At this time the RCA document is available for download.

There are three types of Critical Incidents as follows:

• Disruption – A service is not available, and users are unable to complete business operations. (Example: Users are unable to login to SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing)
• Degradation – A service can only be used to a limited extent due to poor performance causing delay in business operations. (Example: Users of SAP Ariba Supplier Management solutions may experience slowness while navigating and completing tasks)
• Functional Degradation – A particular application functionality or workflow is experiencing an issue. The overall application/service is running and performing as expected. (Example: Users are unable to upload attachments which contain a special character in the file name)

Please see the following Knowledge articles for additional information on Critical Incident notifications:

When will I be notified of a Critical Incident?

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