How are incident severity levels determined?

Severity is determined by a matrix of Business Impact (how many users affected, revenue impact) crossed with Urgency (how quickly it needs resolution). SEV1 is the highest severity, requiring immediate all-hands response.

What is a typical SEV1 response SLA?

A typical SEV1 response requires acknowledgment within 5 minutes, initial comms within 15 minutes, engineering on-call within 15 minutes, and status updates every 15-30 minutes until resolution.

🚨 SRE

Incident Severity Matrix

Select impact and urgency to instantly determine the correct SEV level, response SLA, escalation path and initial communication template. Built for SREs, on-call engineers and incident commanders.

⚙️ Select Impact & Urgency

🎯 Business Impact

⏱ Urgency

📊 Severity Matrix — click any cell to select

Impact ↓ / Urgency →	Immediate	High	Medium	Low
Critical	SEV1	SEV1	SEV2	SEV3
High	SEV1	SEV2	SEV2	SEV3
Medium	SEV2	SEV3	SEV3	SEV4
Low	SEV3	SEV4	SEV4	SEV5

📋 Severity Level Reference

SEV1Critical — immediate all-hands response, CEO/CTO visibility, comms every 15 min

SEV2Major — senior on-call + team lead, comms every 30 min, resolve within 4h

SEV3Significant — on-call engineer leads, comms every hour, resolve within 24h

SEV4Minor — ticket created, no on-call page, resolve within sprint

SEV5Cosmetic — backlog ticket, nice to have, no SLA

📖 How to Use This Tool

▼

Select Business Impact (Critical to Low)

Select Urgency (Immediate to Low)

Get SEV level, response SLA and escalation path

Copy the communication template

📝 Examples

Outage

Input: Critical + Immediate

Output: SEV1 — All hands, 15min comms