Severity levels stop working when everything is a P1

Severity levels have one job. They tell everyone how hard to drop what they are doing. A P1 means wake people up. A P3 means handle it during business hours. The whole system works because the labels mean something different from each other.

It stops working the moment everything becomes a P1. When every incident is the highest severity, the label carries no information, and people start ignoring it, which means the real P1 lands in a team that has learned to shrug.

Severity inflation is real

It creeps in quietly. Someone bumps a P2 to a P1 to get faster attention. It works, so they do it again. Soon everyone has learned that only P1 gets a response, so everything gets filed as P1, and you are back to no prioritization at all, just a queue of equally loud alarms.

Define them by impact, not by panic

A severity should map to impact, not to how stressed the reporter is. Write down what each level means in plain terms. P1 is customer-facing and widespread. P2 is degraded but working. P3 is contained and not urgent. When the definition is concrete, people argue less and the label stays honest.

Let the response match the level

The point of getting severity right is that the response can match it. A real P1 pulls people in immediately. A P3 does not wake anyone. When the levels are accurate, you spend your team's attention where it counts and stop burning people on incidents that could have waited until morning.

Vigiles gives every incident a clear record, so you can look back and see whether your severities matched reality or whether everything was secretly a P1. Or see how incident management works.