Alerts pile up fast. In the time it takes to solve one problem, three more can appear.
The business relies on your team to keep services reliable. Running in fire-drill mode 24/7 works against meeting SLAs because constant alerts quickly lead to alert fatigue. Your team needs a plan.
Prioritization is the core of that plan. An impact urgency priority matrix helps your team decide what to fix first, which protects your security posture and reduces IT costs.
Below are widely used best practice guidelines you can adapt to your organization.
Note: These are high-level recommendations. Customize them to find the groupings that work for your organization and to define incident urgency.
What is the incident priority matrix?
ITIL (originally the Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of best practices for aligning IT services with business needs. Its recommendations are high level, so you can customize them to help your team meet specific SLAs.
An ITIL incident priority matrix ranks incidents by two factors: their impact on your IT environment and the business, and their urgency. Combining the two tells teams which incidents to address first.
Incident urgency and impact
Effective incident management focuses on impact, not the order in which issues arrive. When defining urgency, create a hierarchy that reflects your business priorities, such as restoring customer-facing service before handling other problems.
If every lost second costs revenue, weigh that heavily when building your urgency impact priority matrix.
Following the ITIL incident management priority matrix closely gives your team a proven starting point. That means defining which types of issues are urgent and analyzing their impact on your environment and the business.
Many IT departments use these guidelines to categorize incident urgency:
|
Criteria |
High urgency |
Low urgency |
|
Criticality |
Mission critical for daily operations |
Optional services (i.e., “nice to have, but not essential”) |
|
Time sensitivity |
Extremely time sensitive |
Not time sensitive |
|
Scope / propagation |
Propagation rate rapidly expanding in scope |
Affects only a small section of the IT environment and isn’t expanding |
|
Visibility |
Visibility to business stakeholders or C-suite |
Low visibility in terms of affecting the business |
Your SLAs should guide how your organization defines the difference between incident impact and incident urgency.
Assigning incident impact
Impact and urgency carry equal weight when assigning incident priority. Together, they clarify which P1 or P2 issues demand an immediate response.
Presorting incidents by urgency filters noise automatically, separating issues that need immediate attention from those that can wait. The ITIL impact urgency priority matrix gives your team clear guidelines for assigning these criteria.
Timelines matter too. Based on your SLAs, define who must respond to a P1 or P2 issue and how quickly.
If issue resolution doesn’t occur within a defined timeframe, escalate the incident and consider stakeholders who should (or shouldn’t) be notified.
PagerDuty supports both sides of the matrix, with incident priority levels and high- or low-urgency notifications, so responders know what to act on first. Paired with your priority matrix, that helps reduce alert fatigue, downtime, and incident impact.
Start a free PagerDuty trial to put your priority matrix into practice.