Imagine being an Ops engineer in a team just struck by tragedy. Alarms start ringing, and incident response is in full force. It may sound like the situation is in control. WRONG! There's panic everywhere. The on-call team is scrambling for the heavenly door to redemption. But, the only thing that doesn't stop - Stakeholder Inquiries. This situation is bad. But it could be worse. Now imagine being a less-experienced Ops engineer in a relatively small on-call team struck by tragedy. If you don't have sufficient guidance, let alone moral support- you're toast.

Major outages are bound to occur in even the most well-maintained infrastructure and systems. Being able to quickly classify the severity level also allows your on-call team to respond more effectively. Imagine a scenario where your on-call team is getting critical alerts every 15 minutes, user complaints are piling up on social media, and since your platform is inoperative revenue losses are mounting every minute. How do you go about getting your application back on track? This is where understanding incident severity and priority can be invaluable. In this blog we look at severity levels and how they can improve your incident response process.

On-call schedules ensure that there's someone available day and night to fix or escalate any issues that arise. Using an on-call schedule helps keep things running smoothly. These on-call workers can be anyone from nurses and doctors required to respond to emergencies to IT and software engineering staff who need to fix service outages or significant bugs. Being on-call can be challenging and stressful. But with the proper practices in place, on-call schedules can fit well into an employee's work-life balance while still meeting the organization's needs.