Working with Customers › How to Create and Manage Customers › Identify Customers, Sub-Customers, and Priorities

Identify Customers, Sub-Customers, and Priorities

First, you identify your customers. Is your customer a region, a company department, an actual buyer of your cloud services, or another entity?

Sub-customers are customers within a larger customer entity. For example, say that your company has divisions in North and South America and each division has the following departments: Accounting, Finance, and Human Resources.

You can identify the following customers (divisions) and sub-customers (departments). You can then monitor the customer impact of any managed services on any division as a whole or on an individual department:

North America

• Accounting
• Finance
• Human Resources

South America

• Accounting
• Finance
• Human Resources

For each customer and sub-customer, you can optionally apply a customer priority.

Although the alert severity determines the customer impact, you can use both customer priority and customer impact to determine escalation policy and alert queues. For escalation policies, if an alert impacts multiple customers, the escalation policies on the higher priority customer are applied first. For alert queues, you can use the customer priority and the customer impact when building rules. For example, you can define an alert queue where alerts of any severity are included if the customer priority is a certain level. Similarly, you can define an alert queue where alerts are included if the customer impact is above a certain threshold, such as Moderate.

Consider an administrator that creates customers for its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services. Each customer represents a virtual machine or network in a cloud that are sold to clients. The administrator determines that a particular virtual machine is the highest importance due to the service level agreement. The administrator creates a customer that is comprised of that virtual machine's services and sets the priority to 10 (the highest priority). The administrator can then configure the escalation policy to trigger first on the highest priority customer. Operators then resolve the highest priority virtual machine issues quickly and they maintain the service level agreement.