Incident Severity Levels | Notion

<aside> ⚠️ If there's any doubt about the severity level of an incident assume that it's a higher level and mobilize resources appropriately.

</aside>

Severity	Description	Examples	Response Window	Post Mortem Required	Comms Requirements
P1	A complete site-wide outage	- All of our applications are down, no work can be done by anyone	Immediate - 24/7 - Escalate and pull in any needed resources	Full Post Mortem	Email Whole Company to let them know. For outages lasting longer than an hour updates should be sent hourly.
P2	A critical incident with very high impact	- A System required by multiple customers is unusable	Immediate 24/7	Full Post Mortem
P3	A major incident	- A system required by a single customer is broken in a way that stops them from being able to use the system or seriously degrades the quality of their engagement with us	On-Call Response during work hours	Full Post Mortem
P4	A minor incident	- A widely used system has an inconvenient or annoying bug that has a workaround but needs attention	On-Call Response during working hours	Technical Note
P5	Informational	- A state with reduced redundancy or higher risk

Breaks in deployment pipelines, staging environment or developer environments
Information about migrations | On-Call response during working hours, triage based upon other workloads | Technical Note (If Needed) | |

Prioritization Guidance

What do I do when there are multiple incidents happening?
1. Prioritize by Incident Severity Levels
2. Then prioritize by revenue impact, customer impact, or number of users (fix the worst thing first)
3. If all of these are the same fix the thing that has the clearest/fastest path to resolution (go from 2 broken things to 1 broken things all else being equal).

Inspiration Articles