Business operations concept · updated August 9, 2026

Incident Severity

Incident severity is a defined tier ranking how serious a problem is, used to determine how urgently and how widely it needs a response.

Example

A payment processing outage affecting every client is a higher severity than a single client's report of a cosmetic display issue, and gets a faster, broader response accordingly.

Why it matters

A shared severity scale means everyone reaches the same conclusion about how urgently to respond, instead of it depending on who happens to notice first.

Limits and cautions

A severity scale with too many tiers, or vague criteria for each, becomes a judgment call every time rather than a genuinely shared standard.

Relevance to Stelaah

Stelaah's task and request priority fields can encode a severity tier that drives routing and notification, where that configuration is supported.

This connection describes product intent, not a guarantee that every plan or workflow supports every related capability.