Better Incidents is where incident management practitioners come to learn, connect, and share. Get the resources and best practices to better manage — and learn from — incidents. This repository contains all of the open source process documents and templates. Please feel free to read, contribute, and fork everything you find.

This repository contains documentation to jumpstart an incident management program with your team. The definitions, process, and template provide sane defaults. The folks who have contributed here have several collective years of incident management experience. And there’s one thing we know for sure: there’s no single right way to build an incident management process. We hope your contributions and forks will help us.

All documentation can be found in the docs/ folder, with additional subfolders for definitions and resources like the incident managers template. Keep reading this README to learn more about each of them.

The Incident Process document is helpful to align teams on a single process as you begin to start your incident management program for engineering. It covers:

• Declaration - How we declare incidents.
• Response - How we investigate, coordinate, and communicate.
• Mitigation - What we consider mitigation, and what we do when we've mitigated.
• Durable resolution - What does a durable resolution mean, and how we collaborate to achieve it.

The process documentation is a great starting point for teams looking to implement an incident management process.

• Use the response process

Incidents are wide blast radius events and impact several different personas simultaneously. We provide principles to help members of different personas have a mental framework during incidents.

• Use the incident principles

The incident manager template is used to make it easy to track important milestones, events, and other critical details about an incident that empower teams to communicate effectively and run invaluable retrospectives.

• Use the incident manager template

This repository aims to provide sane defaults to teams, and as a part of that, there are plain english definitions for common incident management idioms and words.

• Severities
• Incident Roles
• Milestones

Want to contribute? Heck yeah! We accept contributions from fixing typos to entirely new content.

• Start a new issue on this repository
• Fill out the issue template
• Submit!

All contributions are reviewed by our maintainers. See CODEOWNERS