Architecture & practice·Incidents and what happens after
you had to pick a number in the first two minutes that decided who got woken up.
Severity level
Also calledsev1, severity, priority level
The agreed scale that maps impact to response: who is paged, who is told, how often updates go out. Its value is that it removes negotiation from the worst possible moment, so the definitions need to be concrete enough to apply while half-informed. Severity is a statement about impact and should be revised as impact becomes clearer, in both directions.