Incident Severity Levels: SEV-1 to SEV-5 Calibration

Short summary

A practical guide to calibrating incident severity levels SEV-1 through SEV-5 with concrete definitions, response-time targets, and a user-impact matrix for fast assignment. Includes auto-escalation rules, downgrade protocols, SLO error-budget alignment, and incident-type labeling. Recommends a calibration exercise: have SRE leads independently score past incidents and retrain if disagreement exceeds 20%.

• •Defines SEV-1 to SEV-5 with clear criteria, response targets, and a user-impact-by-degradation matrix for fast assignment
• •Auto-escalation rules escalate SEV-2 to SEV-1 based on time, impact growth, or revenue loss thresholds
• •SLO error-budget burn should dynamically adjust severity thresholds; review SEV-1/2s monthly for calibration drift

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.