Hi,

We recently had an issue occur within our data centre where we could see that we were going to have a failure which would cause a critical system to go down. As we had a limited amount of pre-warning, our team notified the end users and scheduled some downtime to resolve the problem. The issue we have is that we do not have any definition of how much notice needs to be given to end users of planned downtime outside of the regular maintenance schedule.

Could anyone share their practices / industry standard views as to when a planned outage should be logged as unplanned. i.e. If the customer is given 24hrs notice then the downtime would be logged as planned, with less than 24hrs it should be logged as unplanned.

This is important for our SLA's which are presented to our customers, but which also directly impact our bonuses.

Thanks for your help,