Severity Levels (SEV1, SEV2, SEV3)

Severity levels classify incidents by their impact so teams respond in proportion. Labels such as SEV1 (most severe) to SEV4, or P1 to P4, are common, but there is no universal standard. Each organization defines its own.

Why it matters

Without a scale, every event feels equally urgent, or nothing does. Severity drives practical decisions: whether to wake someone at night, whether to appoint an incident commander, how often to update the status page, and which stakeholders to inform. It also helps measure trends over time.

Example

One possible definition:

SEV1  Full outage or data loss; respond immediately, 24/7
SEV2  Major feature broken or many users affected; respond within 15 min
SEV3  Minor feature degraded, workaround exists; business hours
SEV4  Cosmetic issue or request; backlog

The level can be raised or lowered as facts emerge.

Common mistakes

• Defining levels by technical cause rather than customer impact.
• Setting too many levels. Three or four is usually enough.
• Debating the level for too long. Choose higher when unsure and downgrade later.
• Never updating the criteria as the product changes.

Related

• Incident
• Escalation policy
• Outage
• Incident commander

यह पेज सामान्य जानकारी है, जिसे हमारी संपादकीय टीम ने लिखा है और दस्तावेज़ीकरण बदलने पर अपडेट किया जाता है। सर्वर और प्रदाता अलग-अलग होते हैं, इसलिए बदलाव पहले सुरक्षित तरीके से जाँचें। देखें: संपादकीय नीति और अस्वीकरण.