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Incident Response: from alert to postmortem

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Key idea:

Six steps: (1) Declare the incident and set severity (SEV-1/2/3). (2) Assign an Incident Commander — they coordinate, they don't fix. (3) Open a dedicated channel (Slack/Zoom). (4) Stream updates to the status page every 30 min. (5) Fix → verify → resolve. (6) Postmortem within 48 hours: timeline, root cause, action items. A blameless culture is non-negotiable.

Below: details, example, related terms, FAQ.

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Details

  • Severity matrix: SEV-1 (outage → all hands), SEV-2 (degradation), SEV-3 (minor)
  • Incident Commander coordinates, does not code — otherwise the team loses focus
  • Single source of truth: one channel (#inc-2026-04-18-db) + one doc
  • Internal vs external comms: status page + Twitter, no details until RCA
  • Postmortem: what happened, why, impact, action items (owner + due date)

Example

# Incident template (Slack)
:rotating_light: SEV-2 incident declared
**Impact**: 20% of API requests returning 500
**Started**: 14:23 UTC
**IC**: @alex
**Channel**: #inc-2026-04-18-db
**Status page**: https://status.example.com/i/abc123

# Updates every 30 min
14:23 Declared, investigating
14:38 DB connection pool exhausted
14:52 Rolled back deploy 07f2
15:02 Recovery confirmed, monitoring
15:30 Resolved, postmortem 2026-04-20

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Frequently Asked Questions

Blameless postmortem?

Culture + a written standard. Focus on the system, not the person. "What let this bug happen?" instead of "who screwed up?"

How fast do I write the postmortem?

SEV-1: 48 hours. SEV-2: one week. SEV-3: optional. Timeboxing beats depth.

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PagerDuty / Opsgenie — on-call routing. Jeli, incident.io — full incident platforms. Slack Workflow Builder for small teams.

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