CSCS service commitments for the website and /or Confluence. The SLA can then all point to this page.
Customers
CSCS has two types of customers - departments and individuals being provided IT services directly from CSCS and service providers who are often IT teams who take infrastructure services from CSCS but do offers IT services on an 'opt in' basis primarily for the School of Clinical Medicine, but also serving some departments and institutions from the School of Biological Sciences. This document will outline our delivery targets for the services that we support.
Customers
CSCS provides services to departments and individuals who opt in to receive specific IT services directly from CSCS. In some instances departments take CSCS infrastructure as a service and manage the direct support of their end users themselves. The following service commitments do not apply consistently to both types of service provision and exceptions will be noted belowon the list of our service offerings.
Services and our Service Catalogue
We keep our subscription costs as low as we can by offering standard services and delivering them in a consistent fashion. For that reason, any requests that go outside of what has been established will need to be carefully considered by CSCS to assess the impact to our existing services, staff, processes and tools and may well not result in a change to our service in the short term. You can see a list of our services here https://confluence.medschl.cam.ac.uk/x/vQhEAQ. There are current service offerings here - CSCS Services and How to Access Them. This page provides links to the service catalogue should you wish to request any of these services.
Response and resolution of Incidents and Service Requests
CSCS strives to provide a consistent and appropriate experience for all of our customers and end users. Due to the nature of the University we do not have absolute control over some the technical parts of our infrastructure so we express these as targets. We report against our targets monthly to the Clinical School senior management team.
We classify incoming contacts to CSCS as either Incidents or Service Requests. Incidents are typically when something is broken, down, severely impacted or not working as expected. A Service Request represents a request to add, amend, or remove a service from our service catalogue. Incidents and Requests are subject to different procedures and targets as outlined below.
Incident Prioritisation
When logging an incident on our self service portal you are asked to assess impact and urgency of your issue, ; from this, we set a priority from between 1 -and 5 is set. Our staff will then review and may adjust according to our workload and other commtiments commitments at the time. The highest priority will always be getting anything that is stopping an issue that stops someone from working in , with a view to getting them to a working state either by a fix or a workaround.
Incident response Times
- 0-4 hours (during business hours) for issues classified as P1
- 3-8 hours (during business hours) for issues classified as P2
- 8-24 hours (during business hours) for issues classified as P3
- Within 48 hours for issues classified as P4
- Within 80 hours (2 weeks) for issues classified as P5
Incident Resolution targets
work around.
Below is the matrix of impact and urgency that we use to prioritise issues with the impact on the left and urgency across the top.
High | Medium | Low | |
|---|---|---|---|
Single Person | P2 | P3 | P5 |
Research Group / Team | P2 | P3 | P4 |
Department (billing group, research group, office etc) | P2 | P3 | P4 |
Building | P1 | P2 | P3 |
Institution (e.g. a campus - SLCU, Addenbrookes) | P1 | P2 | P3 |
Incident Response Times
We aim to acknowledge and respond to a new incident within the time frames outlined below. Note these are expressed in working hours.
P1 = 1 hour
P2 = 2 hours
P3 = 8 hours
...
P3 = 24 hours (3 working days)
P4 = 40 hours (5 working days)
P5 = 80 hours (10 working days)
...
Incident Resolution Targets
We aim to resolve an incident within the time frames outlined below. Note these are expressed in working hours.
P1 = 2 hours
P2 = 1 working day
P3 = 3 working days
Service Request Resolution Targets
Each service request in the Service Catalogue service catalogue has a predefined delivery target which will be displayed when a request is logged. . Most will display a Delivery Estimate when the Service Request is logged. Note the Average Delivery information is not necessarily accurate.
Service Uptime and Availability Commitments
We aim for our services to be up and available for use 99% uptime of the time during working hours and best efforts outside of these hours.
Change Windows and Notifications of Works
We have a weekly change window from Wednesday 17:30 to Thursday 08:00 (14.5 hour window). If we are completing non-disruptive maintenance (which involves no downtime or impact on users) this will take place during this period with no notification.
Planned outage / downtime – notification for planned outages/downtime during a vulnerable period will be sent 6 days beforehand (the Thursday before). Then a reminder will be sent the day before the outage.
Unplanned outage / downtime – As soon as possible, subsequent updates to be sent as soon as more information becomes available, or workaround is implemented.
CSCS Working Hours
CSCS is open from 8:30 am - 5:00 pm weekdays, excluding bank and University / School holidays or closures. The Service Desk has slightly different hours and is open from 9-5pm.
In order to keep our staff trained and informed, we may hold staff events once per quarter which will result in the closure of our service for half a day for the event.
Monitoring and After Hours Activities
We do monitor our infrastructure outside of working hours and should any part of the core functionality fail we will attend and intervene. Core functionality is: core routing and network services, ability to log in, Group Drives and other data storage, VPN, Email
Change windows and notifications of works
1 hour vulnerable window per week during standard hours (Tuesday - 8:00 – 9:00am)
- Planned outage / downtime – for significant outages 2 weeks prior to outage. Then reminder to be sent 2 weeks and the day before the outage.
- Unplanned outage / downtime – As soon as possible, subsequent updates to be sent as soon as more information becomes available, or workaround is implemented.
- Emergency outage – as soon as possible, and if possible giving an hour before the outage happens.
- Advisory notification – a week prior the event.
- Updates – as soon as it becomes available, for example when a workaround is implemented.
- Postponing an outage / downtime – as soon as it is confirmed that the downtime cannot be performed as originally planned.
- Resolved / Completed notifications – Once services restored, testing performed. To be sent by the team performing the maintenance work.
- Cancellation – as soon as it is confirmed that the downtime cannot be performed as originally planned.
- Reminders – see as above.
Contacting CSCS
Our Self Service Portal is https://itsupportitsupportcscs.medschl.cam.ac.uk. You haloitsm.com/portal/home. You can log incidents and service requests and track the progress of your open issues here.
Phone: 01223 336261 (open during our working hours)
In person: come to the service hatch on the 3rd level of the Clincial School building during working hoursCSCS is not currently open to drop-in visits. You must prearrange your visit by speaking with one of our staff.
The CSCS Service Desk acts as your single point of contact into the team on the phone, self service portal , email or in personemail.
Escalations
Should you have any comments or concerns regarding our services you can contact the service desk or any of the CSCS management team . There is also a feedback form on our website https://cscs.medschlusing the dedicated feedback Email address: cscsfeedback@medschl.cam.ac.uk/about-us/feedback-services/ that you can fill out.
Surveys
We may send out surveys on a random interval after a ticket has been closed. We also do annual satisfaction surveys.
Customer Obligations
Anyone who uses CSCS services is a customer and needs to be aware of and follow the relevant policies as outlined on this page: https://cscs.medschl.cam.ac.uk/about-us/policies/. To access any CSCS services you will need a CSCS account which costs £5.37/month.