Assignment & ownership

  • Primary and secondary owners: Define who is responsible now and who backs them up.
  • Rotational ownership: Rotate primary owners per shift template so coverage feels fair.
  • Escalation chains: Configure layered assignments so watching leadership knows what is happening.
  • Ownership history: Track who touched the incident to aid audits and retros.

Severity & status

  • Severity adjustments: Bump or lower severity as you learn more (P1 → P2, etc.).
  • Status controls: Move between Investigating, Mitigated, Monitoring, and Resolved with notes.
  • SLA guardrails: Define thresholds for MTTA and MTTR per severity level and get alerted when you slip.
  • Automations: Trigger notifications when severities change or statuses linger.

Logs & comments

  • Play-by-play logging: Append updates as the responders work (diagnostics run, tests applied).
  • Comment threads: Mention teammates to get quick context without switching tools.
  • Attachments: Link to dashboards, repo commits, or runbooks for fast truth.

Runbooks & automation

Runbooks keep consistency when response velocity matters.

  • Associate runbook templates with incident types (deploy, infra, third-party outage).
  • Run automation scripts from the incident card (e.g., restart service, rotate secrets).
  • Automatically create Jira issues or tasks when incidents move to Resolved.