Automatic Severities

FireHydrant enables you to configure incident severities, and assign severities to incidents based on rules that you define.

Navigate to your Severities options by clicking the Incident Response dropdown in the left nav and selecting Severities. This opens the page where you can configure your severity matrix and also create new severities as needed.

Severity Matrix

Have you ever experienced a time when someone in your company marked an incident as highly critical, but when the incident was investigated, it turned out to be a simple bug? The severity matrix improves your workflow by enabling engineers to define severity levels for different variants of customer impacts and/or functionality conditions. Let's take a look at how this is implemented.

The matrix contains a row for each service and a column for various conditions. You can add services and conditions to the matrix. FireHydrant comes with some options by default, but you'll be able to configure both impacts and conditions as you'd like.

This example contains five conditions, which might be described as:

• Unavailable : complete functionality loss
• Degraded : something isn't working quite right and isn't fully unavailable
• Bug : no critical logic is broken, but it is still something that should be fixed

The fields on this matrix do not need to be completely filled out. Fields left empty will defaults to a severity level of Not Set.

After you fill out the matrix, severity can be automatically set based off two questions: who is impacted by this condition, and how severe is the impact?

Creating new severities

On the bottom half of the Severities page, you can create, edit, or delete severities.

By default, FireHydrant includes the following severities:

• SEV1 - SEV5 : SEV1 is the worst case, SEV5 is the least urgent
• GAMEDAY : for internal incident response practice
• MAINTENANCE
• UNSET

Creating new priorities

On the bottom half of the Severities page, you can create, edit, or delete priorities.

By default, FireHydrant includes P1-P4 priorities with a default of P4. To see more about using priority and severity together, please see Incident Severity and Priority 101.