# Five rules for running an incident

DevFeed: [Five rules for running an incident](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/five-rules-for-running-an-incident-34021.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://sridharrajarao.com/blog/running-an-incident/>)

Author: Sridhar Rajarao

Published: 2026-05-27T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Sridhar Rajarao](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/sridhar-rajarao.md>)

Topics: [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>), [Learning](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/learning.md>)

Tags: [customer-experience](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/customer-experience.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [incident-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-management.md>), [on-call](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/on-call.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [postmortem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/postmortem.md>), [production](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/production.md>), [recovery](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/recovery.md>), [reliability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/reliability.md>), [root-cause-analysis](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/root-cause-analysis.md>), [rules](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/rules.md>), [signal](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/signal.md>), [speed](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/speed.md>), [sre](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/sre.md>), [team](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/team.md>)

## AI overview

This opinion article presents five rules for handling production incidents: assess severity by customer impact, use an Incident Commander, mitigate before investigating root cause, maintain regular communication, and use postmortems for learning and accountable follow-up.

## Source excerpt

The difference between a 10-minute incident and a 3-hour outage is rarely technical. Five things I wish every on-call team locked in before their first big page.