Incident Priorities

Add priority to incidents for classification thus promoting efficient and effective triage.

Incident priority allows you to classify incidents based on a level of prioritization. Establishing incident classification levels and response plans based on priorities and thus, sharing this information throughout the entire organization is ideal. It's important to remember that resolution plans aren’t exclusively for technical responders and support staff; other departments within an organization may also need to be informed about incidents, understand their assessed impact, and occasionally take part in incident response as needed.

If your organization lacks an established incident classification scheme based on priorities, it is crucial and hence, beneficial to define a limited number of classification levels for efficient triage and major incident response processes. Conversely, if you currently utilize more than five classification levels, carefully assess the practical benefits for your organization. A higher number of levels can only lead to increased complexity and time consumption during the triage process. You will need to ensure that incoming incidents are associated with the 5 allowed, pre-defined priority levels in Squadcast.

Incidents can be classified into 5 different priority levels, the allowed values being P1, P2, P3, P4, and P5 with P1 being the highest priority. If no priority is set for an incident, then it will be Unset by default.

Prioritize Incidents

Priority of an incident can be set or edited at any point in its lifecycle (across all states - Triggered, Acknowledged, Resolved, Suppressed).

While Creating a New Incident

Anywhere in the system when you are creating a new incident, you can set a priority level for it by choosing one of the options in the drop-down. However, if the priority cannot be determined yet and is going to be set at a later point in time, you can simply select Unset and proceed with incident creation.

Note: By default, the priority level for every incident is Unset.

For Existing Incidents

Priority levels can be set or edited for incidents either in the Incident List or in the Details page of incidents.

From the Incident List page

If you are looking to set or edit the priority for a single incident, you can simply hover over the incident and select Update Priority. From the drop-down, you can choose one of the options and that will be updated.

If you are looking to set or edit the priority for multiple incidents in one go, start by selecting multiple incidents and selecting Update Priority bulk action on the top. From the drop-down, you can choose one of the options and the selected priority level will be set for all the selected incidents.

From the Details page

In the Details page of an incident, you can click on the Priority drop-down to set or edit the priority level.

Whenever a priority level is set or edited, a log for it is present in the Activity Timeline of the incident.

Filtering and Sorting

Incidents can be filtered based on priority levels on the Incident List page.

An important outcome of classifying incidents based on priority levels is to be able to view all the high-priority incidents at the top, grouped together so that responders and other members in your organization are informed of the ongoing critical issues. This is possible in the Incident List page by sorting on the Priority column.

Note: This is a one-way sort. When a user clicks the sort icon in the Priority column, all the P1s are bubbled on the top, followed by P2s, and so on until P5. All the Unset priority incidents would be grouped below P5. If you wish to sort incidents based on the time of creation, you can click the sort icon next to Created At and that will reset the sorting based on time.

Filtering on Priorities for Analytics

Analytics for your Team or Organization can be viewed by setting filters, one of the filters now being priorities. Just like with the other filters for Analytics, you can select Add Filters > Priority > Select a level and view results.