Incident Response Decision Tree
Guide on-call engineers from alert detection through severity triage to resolution and review.
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An incident response decision tree branches an on-call engineer through the steps of handling a production incident. The root is alert detection, branching into severity triage, then into paths for declaring an incident, assigning a commander, mitigating the issue, and communicating to stakeholders, ending in resolution and a postmortem. Each branch represents a decision based on impact.
SRE teams, DevOps engineers, and incident commanders use it to standardize on-call behavior, reduce mean time to resolution, and train new responders. It anchors runbooks, on-call playbooks, and reliability training for teams adopting formal incident management.
Great for
- On-call playbooks
- Incident runbooks
- Reliability training
- SRE onboarding
- Process standardization
Frequently asked questions
What is an incident response decision tree?+
It is a branching flowchart that guides on-call engineers through detecting, triaging, mitigating, and resolving a production incident based on its severity.
What are the steps of incident response?+
The core steps are detection, severity triage, declaring an incident, mitigation, stakeholder communication, resolution, and a postmortem review.
How is incident severity decided?+
Severity is set by impact on users and revenue, with higher severities triggering an incident commander, broader paging, and formal communication.
Why run a postmortem after an incident?+
A blameless postmortem captures root cause and action items so the team can prevent recurrence and improve mean time to resolution.
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