# Designing your incident severity levels

DevFeed: [Designing your incident severity levels](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/designing-your-incident-severity-levels-11754.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://incident.io/blog/designing-your-incident-severity-levels>)

Author: Stephen Whitworth

Published: 2022-02-17T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The incident.io Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-incident-io-blog.md>)

Topics: [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>), [incident management](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident-management.md>), [Incident response](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident-response.md>), [Automation](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/automation.md>)

Tags: [article](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/article.md>), [automation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/automation.md>), [best-practices](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/best-practices.md>), [guide](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/guide.md>), [how-to](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/how-to.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [incident-channel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-channel.md>), [incident-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-management.md>), [incident-response](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-response.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [p4](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/p4.md>), [post-mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/post-mortem.md>), [slack-incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/slack-incident.md>)

## AI overview

This article explains how to design incident severity levels that measure impact, establish shared expectations, and help teams coordinate and prioritize incident response. It describes common P1 through P4 classifications and explains how severity can drive processes and automation, such as notifying executives about critical outages.

## Source excerpt

Learn how to design incident severity levels to streamline incident management, improve response times, and prioritize issues effectively.