Monitoring Services from the Dashboard › Dashboard Terminology › Risk

Risk

Risk indicates the likelihood of delivering the quality of service that is required to support the overall business objectives. The highest propagated impact of an associated risk alert determines the service risk value. If an alert has no defined type, it is a risk alert by default.

In an IT infrastructure, risk is the measure of how much the problems that are currently associated with an IT element impacts the likelihood that the required service quality levels are delivered. In other words, as IT elements encounter problems, the risk of service quality degradation increases.

Due to typical IT risk-mitigation measures such as redundancy, fault tolerance, and high availability, faults in the IT infrastructure may not directly result in service quality degradation. However, these faults do increase the risk of delivering the required service quality.

For example, consider a server farm that has 12 servers that support an online application:

• If three of the servers are unavailable, the risk of a service outage can be considered Slight.
• If six of the servers are unavailable, the risk of a service outage can be considered Moderate.
• If ten of the servers are unavailable, the risk of a service outage can be considered Severe.

The risk settings are Down, Severe, Moderate, Slight, None, and Unknown.