Defining clear Incident Severity levels is a key component to an efficient Incident Management process that helps Engineering teams quickly respond to outages and mitigate customer impact.

Operating an online platform with multiple nines of availability is a complex task, modern websites depend on thousands to hundreds of thousands of individual moving parts all of which need to work correctly in order to provide a satisfactory user experience. When any one of those parts fails then an Incident Management process is needed to coordinate mitigation efforts and resolve the impact as quickly as possible getting the system back into working order.

Incident Management starts by answering a seemingly simple question: How bad is the problem? Knowing how big the issue is that we are dealing with is crucial to understanding the appropriate response to that particular problem. When the problem is small we probably don’t need to notify our C-suite level leadership or send a notice to all customers … but if it is really big then we absolutely need a communication strategy that notifies relevant stakeholders.

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