Severity levels (SEV) are a numerical classification system used to rank the business impact of an incident and dictate the urgency of the response. A SEV1/Critical represents a critical outage affecting all users (e.g., the site is down), while a SEV3/Minor is a minor issue with a clear workaround (e.g., a broken UI element). These levels are used to trigger automated escalation paths, ensuring that high-stakes problems receive immediate executive and technical attention.
Key Benefits of Severity Levels
- Standardized Urgency: SEV levels remove subjectivity from the incident, ensuring that "Critical" always means "Critical" across all departments.
- Automated Escalation Routing: High-severity incidents can automatically trigger different notification channels, such as phone calls for SEV1s and simple Email pings for SEV3s.
- Clear Stakeholder Communication: Using standardized SEV levels allows management and customers to understand the scale of a problem without needing deep technical details.
Best Practices for Defining Severities
- SEV1 (Critical): Core functionality is unavailable for all users; significant revenue or data loss is occurring.
- SEV2 (Warning): Major functionality is broken for a significant portion of users; no easy workaround exists.
- SEV3 (Minor): Minor features are affected, or there is a viable workaround; the incident does not stop core business operations.
The All Quiet Bridge
All Quiet transforms your severity levels into functional triggers through our dynamic escalation policies. You can configure All Quiet to respond differently based on the SEV level of an incoming alert, for example, automatically escalating a SEV1 to a senior manager if not acknowledged within 5 minutes. With All Quiet, your severity levels aren't just labels; they are the logic that powers your automated 24/7 response.
