Severity Matrix

Have you ever experienced uncertainty as to the criticality of an incident? The severity matrix allows you to use your business rules to specify what severity levels should be automatically assigned to different combinations of fault states and impacted infrastructure. Let's take a look at how this is implemented.

Prerequisites

Access to Severities is restricted to the FireHydrant Owner role.

The impact rows are populated from the service catalog.  You'll need to ensure you have some services, functionalities, and/or environments entered.

Instructions

1. From the FireHydrant web UI, go to Incident Response > Severities.

2. Add columns by selecting Add condition , entering a value, and clicking Save.  Conditions are things that describe the scope of the incident, for example:

• Infrastructure operational status (unavailable, degraded, bug)
• Customers affected (all customers, some customers, few customers, no customers)

To delete or edit a condition column, click on the header.

3. Click Add impact to add rows. The impact row options populate from the service catalog.  Save each entry.

To delete or edit an impact row, click on the header.

4.  Select the default severity for each of the column/row combinations.  For example, if my Grafana production service is unavailable, I may decide that's a SEV 1 because it's business critical.  In contrast, if the Grafana staging environment is down, the default is a SEV-3.

5. To save your severity matrix changes, click Submit.

Now when anyone in your organization kicks off an incident you can be assured that it is being set to the appropriate severity based off your business needs.