Overview
Purpose
Configure incident severity levels and their associated SLAs and workflows. These drive the reminders and cadence of reminders that are sent to Slack and flow into all reporting.
What It Does
Defines severity levels (SEV1-SEV5) with customizable names and SLAs
Sets SLA targets for acknowledgment, validation, updates, and RCA completion
Configure automated reminders and escalations
Optionally, you can set up a matrix to automatically calculate severity.
Severity Levels
You can enable up to 5 severity levels with customizable SLA's for each severity. By default we ship with SEV1 & SEV2 enabled.
Calculated Severity Matrix
This functionality is typically only used by large organizations that want to derive the severity based on Business and Functional impacts instead of letting reporters set the severity manually.
How to Configure
Severity Configuration
The SLA of each severity level can be customized. Click on the Severity level you want to adjust, make the appropriate changes and click save.
The severity of an incident will drive the Slack reminder cadence and other related SLA features (such as reporting).
Acknowledgment SLA: The number of minutes teams are required to acknowledge an incident. This is when the incident is transitioned to the 'Assessing' status.
Validation SLA: The number of minutes engineers are required to verify or cancel an incident that is being assessed. This is when the incident is transitioned to the 'Fixing' or 'Canceled' status.
Update SLA: The number of minutes teams are required to post an update to the public incident channel.
RCA Meeting SLA: This is the agreed upon number of calendar days that teams will complete an RCA meeting after an incident has ended.
Action Items SLA: Days to complete any action items assigned in the weekly report.
Adding more Severity Levels
To enable more Severity levels, click on the Severity and click Enable. This will enable a new Severity level. Note that we intentionally limit Severity levels to five (5), as modern Incident philosophy defines incidents as an event that requires urgent attention by engineers. If you find yourself wanting many severity levels, the event may simply be a bug/defect.
Reports
We send reports to the reporting channel in Slack. You can enable/disable these reports, as well as adjust the frequency. Adjustments are reflected after "Save Report Settings" button is click
Daily RCA Reminder: This report gives visibility into RCA's that are in breach of the SLA.
Weekly Report Notifications: This report is Weekly digest of unresolved items and incident follow-up status
Calculated Severity Matrix
We recommend most companies to leave this feature unchecked.
If you want to have reporters specify functional and business impact instead of directly choosing a severity, you can turn on this feature. This will modify both the create incident modal in Jira and in slack to have Functional Impact and Business Impact be selected for new incidents instead of Severity.
To enable calculated severity you need to:
Tick the checkbox titled "Use calculated severity matrix".
Review the matrix configuration of which severity levels you want to map to the 2x2 matrix of impacts.
Potentially you will need to enable any severity levels that are disabled that you select in your matrix. If this is true, you will see a warning and shortcut link to fix this for you. See below for example warning.
Click on the Save button.
Once successfully updated your severity matrix should look something like:
Impact of Calculated Severity Matrix
When enabled, the create incident screen in Jira will change so that the Severity dropdown is disabled and instead calculated based on the Functional Impact and Business Impact dropdowns.
Create Incident in Jira with matrix enabled:
Create Incident in Slack with matrix enabled:
