Working with Customers › How to Create and Manage Customers

How to Create and Manage Customers

As an administrator, you define customers and associate them with service models to see the impact of service degradation on the customer.

A customer in CA SOI is any consumer of a managed service. A customer can represent a specific division of the company such as a product division, region, or city. Customer impact provides IT personnel with an accurate understanding of what fault conditions really mean to a particular customer. For example, the administrator defines a customer to include all services within South America. If a fault occurs on a CI, such as a router, the IT personnel can easily determine how South America is impacted.

Alerts can indicate both service impact and customer impact. To determine the customer impact, an administrator creates a customer and assigns services to that customer.

Sub-customers represent smaller divisions of a larger entity customer. For example, you can create a customer that represents a geographical division and sub-customers for smaller regions. You could continue to create additional sub-customers for cities, office buildings, office floors, and so on. You could also create a customer that is your cloud network and the sub-customers are the actual components utilized by those paying for your service. The number of sub-customers and nesting levels depends on how you want to monitor the customer impact.

Administrators can place a priority on a customer, which weighs that customer as higher or lower than other customers.

Administrators can use customer conditions as criteria to define escalation policy and alert queue rules. For example, you can create an escalation policy that sends an email to a specific IT person when the customer impact is Severe. An administrator can also use runtime tokens that display the customer name and severity in escalation actions. For more information about using runtime tokens, see Expandable Runtime Tokens.

Use this scenario to guide you through the process:

1. Identify the customers and their sub-customers
2. Identify the services
3. Create the customers
4. (Optional) Create the sub-customers
5. (Optional) Perform any of the following tasks:
   • Configure the customer priority and labels.
   • Create the escalation policy and alert queues using customer-related conditions.
   • View the customer and the sub-customer information.
   • View the customer metrics.
   • View the customers that are associated with a particular service.

An example shows you a real-world scenario for creating the customers, sub-customers, priorities, assigning services, and creating escalation policies and alert queues utilizing customers.