Incident severity levels (SEV1, SEV2)
Agreed levels, usually SEV1 to SEV4, that say how bad an incident is and what response it gets: who is paged, who leads, how often customers hear from you.
SEV1 typically means a core flow is down for many users or data is at risk; lower levels cover partial or cosmetic problems. Defining them in advance avoids arguing during the incident. A serious incident gets one incident commander who coordinates while others fix, a status page or customer updates on a fixed rhythm, and a postmortem afterwards. Response times in an SLA are usually tied to these levels.
Related terms
- On-call rotation: A schedule that names who responds to production alerts outside normal work, with an escalation path if that person does not answer.
- Postmortem (blameless): A written review after an incident: what happened, why, how it was handled and what changes so it does not repeat.
- SLA (service level agreement): A contract that defines availability, response and fix times per priority, and what happens when they are missed.
- MTTR (mean time to recovery): The average time from a production failure to the service working again for users; one of the DORA metrics of software delivery.
