Comparison
IncidentvsSeverity level
Incident
you declared it before you knew how bad it was, because declaring is cheap and being late is not.
A disruption or imminent disruption that requires an urgent, coordinated response. It is a process word rather than a severity word: declaring one is what summons the roles, the channel and the timeline, and doing it early is almost always correct. Teams that hesitate to declare usually have a process that punishes declaring, which is the thing to fix rather than the hesitation.
Full entry →Severity level
you had to pick a number in the first two minutes that decided who got woken up.
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.
Full entry →