What Are Incident Severity Levels? (SEV1 to SEV3 explained) | Better Stack Community (2023)

Not all incidents are created equal — prioritizing incidents based on theimpact they have on your business improves collaboration and makes for fasterincident resolution.

But how do you prioritize incidents?

Enter severity levels.

What are severity levels?

Severity levels is a measurement of the impact anincident has on your business. Commonly usedseverenity ranking is from SEV 1 (severity 1) to SEV 3 (severity 3), where SEV 1is a critical incident and SEV 3 is a minor incident.

SEV 1 incident could be a situation when a service is down for all users orcustomers, when there has been a major security breach or when customer data arelost. A SEV 1 is defined as a critical incident with high impact on thebusiness.

SEV 2 incident could be a situation when a significant part of the corefunctionality is not-working or when a service is unavailable for a subset ofusers or customers. A SEV 2 is defined as a major incident with significantimpact on the business.

SEV 3 incident could be a situation when a system issue causes a slightinconvenience to the users or customers, but doesn’t influence any major systemfunctions. A SEV 3 is defined as a minor incident with low impact on thebusiness.

The levels can go beyond SEV 3. At larger organisations SEV 4 and SEV 5 areoften used. The number of severity levels can be determined by eachorganisation, but 3 levels are generally enough. More severity levels can leadto confusion and more time spent on accessing which severity level an incidentis instead of actually going forward and start working on the resolution.

Why are severity levels used?

Severity levels isn't just just fancy speak of DevOps teams. SEV levels puteveryone on the same page when an incident happens and can significantly improvethe incident response time.

Main benefit of using severity levels is that a team can connect a level to aspecific process or automation so whenever such incident occurs no improvisationis necessary and pre-made workflows are started.

For example a SEV 1 incident could be connected to an immediate statuspage update and to alerting an c-level company executives.A SEV 3 incident on the other hand can be connected to a much low-level workflow— for example a ticket being created in Jira.

Severity vs. Priority, what’s the difference?

In most cases, severity = priority.

The more severe the incident is, the more of a priority it is for the developerteam. An infrastructure incident that takes down the whole company onlinepresense is the highest priority for the DevOps team right away. But in somecases, you can have a high-priority incident that is not high in severity.

For example, if a recent homepage edit causes that the h1 title tag is notformatted properly, it’s certainly not very severe as the core functionality isnot affected. However, it’s a high priority because it can damage the brandimage of the company and cause confusion among current or potential customers.

Similarly, you can have high-severity, but low-priority incidents. For examplean incident that’s is making your product unavailable for 0.01% of all yourcustomers has a critical impact, because it’s making the product unusable. Butit’s low-priority because it’s only influencing a very small subset ofcustomers.

Because these low-severity + high-priority and high-severity + low-priorityincidents exist we need to distinguish the differences between severity andpriority:

• Severity measures the impact an incident has on the business — It answersquestions about the consequences of an incident.
• Priority measures incident’s urgency — It answers questions about whatshould be fixed first.

The fact that priority tells us what should be fixed first it’s usually betterto focus on working with priorities instead of severity levels. Let’s have alook how the priority levels first approach looks like.

How to use priority levels?

Priority levels work same as severity levels when it comes to numbering. Thelower the number the more priority the incident has.

The main difference is that priority level tells us what incident needs to besolved first, instead of just stating which incident is the most severe (has themost impact).

Simplyfying things: issues with P1 and SEV 3

Severity and priority levels are great in theory, but in practise they are oftentoo complicated. The main reason for having a severity levels setup is tosimplify incident communication within a team, not to complicate it. The goal isto say P1 or SEV 3 and get everyone on the same page immediatelly.

This is sadly often not the case. Especially in high stress situations likebeing waken up by an on-call alert in the middle of thenight. Similarly less technical people might think of SEV 3 as the highestseverity level, while it’s the lowest.

To simplify this we can switch to only using human words. This means thatinstead of using code words like SEV 1, we can use regular words like criticalincident for all SEV 1 or P1 incidents.

Here is how an alternative naming could look like:

Defining incident levels with examples

Another way to make incident levels more approachable is to define them withreal-life examples relevant to your specific product. For example if you arerunning an Airbnb competitor you could define incident levels as following:

This example is simplified, but the essence is that with this table anytechnical or non-technical team member has a very clear understanding what kindof incident is the company facing.

Final thoughs

Using severity, priority or just alternative human worded incident levels is agreat way to step up your incident management.

But keep in mind that any incident levels are only as good as the workflows that are connected with them.And that real-life definitions and examples from your business are the key tothe success of any incident levels implementation.

Learn more about how to improve your incident response:

• Explained: All Meanings of MTTR and Other IncidentMetrics
• How to Create a Developer-Friendly On-Call Schedule in 7steps
• 4 Copy-Pastable Incident Templates for Status Pages

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