Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Critical incidents have a direct impact on your business revenue and the trust your customers place in you. The longer a critical incident goes unnoticed, the higher the stakes. A reliable alert routing setup automatically catches these incidents the moment they trigger and gets them to the right person without delay. This guide walks you through how to build that reliable routing setup.

When a midnight incident triggers, the goal is not to wake your entire team. It’s to reach the one person who can act on it. Everyone else should sleep through it undisturbed. The difference between a team that handles midnight incidents well and one that doesn’t usually comes down to a few decisions made ahead of time. Which incidents actually need a midnight response? Who should get the call? And what should happen to everything else? This guide walks through those decisions.

Severity and priority are two labels that describe different things about an incident. Severity covers the blast radius: how much of your system or how many customers are affected. Priority covers the urgency: how quickly someone needs to act. Routing rules then use these labels to load the right escalation policy for each incident. This guide covers how to define your severity and priority levels and map them to escalation policies.