The StatusCat blog
A practical incident response guide
You don't need a heavyweight process to handle incidents well. Here's a lightweight, practical incident response framework — detect, respond, communicate, resolve, learn.
Incidents are inevitable. What separates teams that handle them well from teams that flail isn't the absence of outages — it's having a simple, agreed process so nobody has to invent one at 3 AM. You don't need a heavyweight framework. You need a handful of clear steps.
Here's a practical incident response flow that works for small teams.
1. Detect
You can't respond to what you don't know about. Good uptime monitoring with sensible alerting is the foundation — it catches the problem before (or at least when) your customers do. Re-check failures before paging so alerts stay trustworthy.
2. Triage — assess severity
When an alert fires, quickly answer: what's affected, and how badly? Agree on simple severity levels ahead of time:
- SEV1 — full outage or data risk. All hands, immediate.
- SEV2 — major feature down or serious degradation. Urgent, but scoped.
- SEV3 — minor or cosmetic. Handle in normal hours.
Severity decides who gets paged and how you communicate.
3. Respond — one owner, then mitigate
Assign a single incident owner (sometimes called the incident commander). Their job isn't to fix everything personally — it's to coordinate: pull in the right people, keep the timeline, and make decisions. Then focus on mitigation first (stop the bleeding — roll back, failover, disable the broken feature) before root-causing.
A clear on-call rotation with escalation makes this step automatic: the alert reaches the right person, and escalates if they don't respond.
4. Communicate
During an incident, silence breeds panic and support tickets. Post to your status page early and update often:
- Investigating — "We're aware and looking into it."
- Identified — "We've found the cause and are working on a fix."
- Monitoring — "A fix is deployed; we're watching."
- Resolved — "It's fixed, here's a short summary."
Honest, prompt updates build more trust than a suspiciously quiet status page.
5. Resolve — and confirm
Deploy the fix, then confirm it actually worked — watch your monitors return to healthy before you call it resolved. Mark the status page resolved and thank people for their patience.
6. Review — a blameless postmortem
The incident isn't over until you've learned from it. Hold a blameless postmortem: what happened, why, and what will stop it recurring. Blameless means focusing on systems and gaps, not individuals — that's how you get honest accounts and real fixes. (See how to write a postmortem.)
Make it repeatable
Write this flow down, keep it short, and make sure everyone knows where it lives. The goal is that when an incident hits, the process is boring — everyone knows their role, communication is automatic, and the drama is in the outage, not the response.
StatusCat gives you the detection and communication layers — monitoring, on-call/escalation, and status pages — in one place, free for 50 monitors.