Incident Severity Classification and Escalation Questions
Assigning severity to incidents, deciding when and whom to page, and moving an issue up defined escalation paths. Covers severity matrices, escalation criteria, triage decisions, and scope-of-authority calls about when to pull in more responders or leadership. The routing and prioritization discipline that sits at the front of the incident lifecycle.
Design an incident escalation policy for an organization that currently has none. Cover detection, severity assignment, primary/secondary responders, who receives executive notifications and when, customer communication templates, concrete SLAs for the first 0-72 hours, and how to test and iterate the policy regularly.
Explain the typical responsibilities of a junior Solutions Architect for incidents across severity levels P1 (critical) to P4 (low). For each severity include expected response time, primary actions, who to notify, and required documentation or post-incident tasks.
Describe a concise escalation matrix you would propose for a high-severity outage that impacts customer-facing APIs. Specify roles (on-call engineer, engineering manager, platform lead, CTO), escalation SLAs in minutes, triggers, and the criteria that mandate executive notification and customer communication.
Design an escalation path and SLA framework for customer issues that require SA involvement after deployment. Define severity levels, response and resolution targets per level, escalation owners, handoffs to engineering or customer success, and sample templates for customer communication at each stage.
Propose a prioritization framework you would present to executive stakeholders that combines SLO breaches, revenue impact, user count affected, regulatory risk, and time-to-fix for triaging incidents. Provide a short formula or scoring approach and explain trade-offs.
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