Determining the business impact

Before you contact IBM® Customer Support, assess the severity level of the problem that you want to report.

When you report a problem to IBM, you are asked to supply a severity level. Therefore, you need to understand and assess the business impact of the problem that you are reporting. Use the following criteria:

Severity 1: The problem has a critical business impact. You are unable to use the program, resulting in a critical impact on operations. This condition requires an immediate solution.
Severity 2: The problem has a significant business impact. The program is usable, but it is severely limited.
Severity 3: The problem has some business impact. The program is usable, but less significant features (not critical to operations) are unavailable.
Severity 4: The problem has minimal business impact. The problem causes little impact on operations, or a reasonable circumvention to the problem was implemented.