Incident management for high-velocity teams
The 7 stages of effective incident response
What is incident response?
Incident response is an organization’s process of reacting to IT threats such as cyberattack, security breach, and server downtime.
Other IT Ops and DevOps teams may refer to the practice as major incident management or simply incident management.
Who handles incident response?
Development, operations, and support teams are all involved in incident response. More broadly, managers of a company’s legal, public relations, or human resources team are also involved.
Incident response includes an organization’s broader strategic handling of an incident. It requires the coordinated oversight of the leadership group, which usually consists of representatives from teams such as the executive board, IT, legal, communications, and HR.
Incident response process
The following sections describe an incident response process, what to do between realizing a service is down and getting it up and running again, based on the material in our own Incident Handbook.
In this article we’ll cover the seven key stages of incident response:
- Detect the incident
- Set up team communication channels
- Assess the impact and apply a severity level
- Communicate with customers
- Escalate to the right responders
- Delegate incident response roles
- Resolve the incident

Setting up an on-call schedule with Opsgenie
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up an on-call schedule, apply override rules, configure on-call notifications, and more, all within Opsgenie.
Read this tutorialIncident response best practices and tips
This collection of incident response best practices and tips will help your team avoid mismanaged incidents, unnecessary delays and associated costs.
Read this article