Group Contact
Tonya Heath
Operations Manager,
ITS Control Center

E-mail: tonya_heath[at]unc.edu
Phone: (919) 962-5469

Standard Procedures

The policies and procedures outlined below are for all ITS-related issues, whether reported by one of our monitoring tools or a customer. Additionally, information regarding our system registration policy is included below.

Critical Tickets Information

ITS has historically defined a critical request as:

  1. An incident that affects an individual's health or safety.
  2. A computing incident that affects multiple users such that University business is disrupted and an Emergency Change Notice is sent to the campus community.
  3. A computing incident that affects one person to the extend that they are unable to complete critical work.

Our goal is to assign the request to the responsible group and ensure its acknowledgement within 15 minutes. If the individual handling the critical incident cannot resolve the issue, other individuals or groups may need to assist and the resolution time may vary.

A customer may request or submit a critical trouble ticket for ITS services that do not provide 24/7/365 support.  In this circumstance, the Control Center will contact the customer and relay when they can expect a response to their request.

If there is any uncertainty about a critical ticket, regardless of the time of day, the Control Center or a Manager On Call is available to discuss the matter.

Customers may check and/or update the status of their request(s) by visiting help.unc.edu, or by calling 962-HELP at any time.

System/Service Administrator Notification Procedures

The Control Center will attempt to contact the administrator responsible for an ITS system or service if one of our monitoring tools identifies an incident.

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Will the Control Center contact an administrator after normal business hours?

If the system/service administrator has identified a service as critical and the monitoring parameters that have been provided indicate the service is operating abnormally, the Control Center will contact them.

Before contacting an administrator, the Control Center will check the Message Center and any special notices to see if there is a known reason for the problem.

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How does the Control Center know who to contact?

Each service group provides the Control Center with at least 3 contacts. The Control Center will attempt to contact the first person via 3 methods (i.e. pager, cell, home/work phone). If the individual does not answer their phone(s) or respond to the pager within 10 minutes, the second contact will be notified. If the second individual does not respond, the third and usually last individual (usually the director for the service) will be notified.

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Will the Control Center create a Remedy ticket each time an administrator is contacted?

For a confirmed incident (one in which both the Control Center and system/service administrator agree) the Control Center will create a ticket and assign it an appropriate severity. The ticket will be assigned to the administrator that was contacted. The Control Center will then set the status to 'Pending Analyst' so the administrator can work the incident without further interruption. The system/service administrator is responsible for updating the ticket worklog and making any other status changes, such as marking the ticket solved.

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Will the Control Center post a change notice?

An emergency change notice will be posted by the Control Center for any incident identified as critical by the system/service administrator. We will use a generic form that indicates 1) that the service is unavailable, 2) that appropriate people have been notified, and 3) that more details may be provided in a follow-up notice.

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What steps are taken when an incident is detected?

  • Check the Message Center (http://help.unc.edu/status.shtml) for scheduled events that might account for the problem.
  • Check any recent exceptions to standard operating procedure that might apply to the problem.
  • If the above steps yield nothing relevant, notify the system/service administrator to confirm the problem and post an emergency change notice if appropriate.
  • Create a Remedy Ticket with the appropriate severity (critical or important) and assign it to the administrator that was contacted. After the ticket has been created, the Control Center will change the status to 'Pending Analyst' so the appropriate administrator can work the incident.
  • The Control Center will contact the ITRC directly to relay current information regarding the incident so the Service Desk can address customer issues or concerns appropriately.
  • The Control Center will post the issue to the Message Center.  Critical incident information will also be posted to help.unc.edu and its.unc.edu.

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System Registration Policy

All systems added to the machine room floor need to be formally registered by 5pm of the day the equipment is put on the floor. The Control Center would prefer advance registration so that we can arrange the necessary electrical, networking and rack resources. For more information, please visit our System Registration page.