# Understanding the differences between severity vs priority in incident management

DevFeed: [Understanding the differences between severity vs priority in incident management](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/understanding-the-differences-between-severity-vs-priority-in-incident-management-11757.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://incident.io/blog/differences-between-severity-and-priority>)

Author: Luis Gonzalez

Published: 2023-01-03T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

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

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

Tags: [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>), [metrics](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/metrics.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [post-mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/post-mortem.md>), [slack-incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/slack-incident.md>)

## AI overview

This article explains the difference between incident severity and priority. It describes severity as a classification based on business or customer impact, while priority is an additional way organizations may tailor their response. It also outlines considerations for defining severity levels, including affected users, user experience, resolution time, and business metrics.

## Source excerpt

Identifying priority and severity is crucial in how you respond to incidents, but these terms aren't necessarily interchangeable. Uncover their uses here.