What are service tiers?

A service tier is a label associated with a service that indicates how critical a service is to the operation of your business. Service tiers allow you to distinguish between services that are mission-critical, and those that are useful and helpful but not essential.

If you have access to Assets in Jira Service Management, you may set up your services as Assets objects and assign tiers to each object. Learn more about how services work with Assets.

You can also use service tiers to trigger automation rules – for example, if a new issue is created and a Tier 1 service is affected, you could automatically send an email to a specific person or group. Learn more about affected services in automation conditions.

All services in your system, no matter how big or how small, should be assigned a service tier. The following sections outline a scale to get you started (you can make adjustments to these recommendations as necessary to accommodate your particular business needs).

Tier 1 services are the most critical services in your system. A service is considered Tier 1 if a failure of that service will result in a significant impact to customers or to the company’s bottom line.

Tier 2 services are important to your business but less critical than Tier 1. A failure in a Tier 2 service can cause a degraded customer experience in a noticeable and meaningful way but does not completely prevent your customer from interacting with your system.

Tier 3 services can have minor, unnoticeable or difficult-to-notice customer impact, or have limited effects on your business and systems. Customers may or may not even notice that a Tier 3 service is failing.

Tier 4 services are ones that, when they fail, cause no significant effect on the customer experience and do not significantly affect the customer’s business or finances.