220-1102 Question 643
Single answerSeverityA help desk technician receives several incident tickets at the start of the shift. One ticket reports that a user's workstation has a failed webcam, but the user can still work normally. Another reports that a shared office printer is jammed, affecting five employees. A third reports that the accounting server is offline and the entire finance department cannot process invoices before a deadline. When assigning severity to the incidents, which ticket should be marked with the HIGHEST severity?
- A
The failed webcam on a single user's workstation
- B
The shared printer jam affecting five employees
- C
The accounting server outage affecting the finance department
- D
All three incidents should be assigned the same severity until root cause is confirmed
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
In A+ Core 2 incident handling and ticketing contexts, severity is typically determined by the scope of impact and the urgency to restore service. A department-wide outage of a critical business system, especially one tied to a time-sensitive financial process, should be prioritized above smaller incidents such as a single-user hardware issue or a shared printer problem. This aligns with common IT service management best practices used in service desks, where technicians assess how many users are affected, whether core business functions are interrupted, and whether there is an immediate deadline or financial consequence. Root cause analysis is important later, but initial severity is set during triage so the correct response and escalation path can begin immediately.
- A. Incorrect.
This is incorrect. A failed webcam affects only one user and does not prevent the user from performing core job functions in the scenario. This would typically be treated as a lower-severity incident because the business impact is limited.
- B. Incorrect.
This is incorrect. A printer outage affecting multiple users is more serious than a single-user peripheral failure, but it usually does not outweigh a department-wide server outage tied to a critical business deadline. The impact is moderate rather than the highest.
- C. Correct.
This is correct. Severity is generally based on business impact and urgency. A server outage affecting an entire department's ability to process invoices before a deadline represents the largest operational and business impact, so it should receive the highest severity classification.
- D. Incorrect.
This is incorrect. Severity is assigned based on the information available at the time of triage, especially impact and urgency, not delayed until root cause is known. Waiting to classify severity would slow escalation and response to the most critical issue.