Severity Levels

Severity determines how urgent an issue is and how it's routed for notification.

Severity Scale

Level	Description	Response
Critical	Service is down or severely impaired	Immediate action required
High	Significant degradation	Address within the hour
Medium	Noticeable issues	Address within the day
Low	Minor problems	Address when convenient

How Severity is Calculated

Severity is determined by two factors:

1. Error Category Severity - Base severity for the type of error
2. Test Importance - Ceiling based on the test's importance level

The final severity is the minimum of these two:

Final Severity = min(Category Severity, Importance Ceiling)

Example

Scenario	Category	Importance	Final
Prod API down	Critical	Production	Critical
Staging API down	Critical	Staging	High
Dev slow response	Medium	Development	Medium
Internal tool error	High	Internal	Low

Configuring Category Severity

Workspace admins can customize the base severity for each error category:

1. Go to Settings → Severity
2. Find the error category to modify
3. Select the new severity level
4. Click Save Changes

Default Mappings

Category	Default Severity
ServiceUnavailable	Critical
Timeout	Critical
ConnectionRefused	Critical
DnsResolutionFailed	Critical
SslCertificateError	High
ServerError	High
AssertionFailed	Medium
BadRequest	Low
AuthenticationFailed	Medium
Forbidden	Medium
NotFound	Low
RateLimited	Medium

Customization Examples

Treat 404s as Critical (for critical resources):

• NotFound → Critical

Treat timeouts as Medium (for slow but non-critical APIs):

• Timeout → Medium

Reset to defaults:

• Click Reset to Defaults to restore original mappings

Importance Levels

Each test has an importance level that caps severity:

Importance	Max Severity
Production	Critical
Staging	High
Development	Medium
Internal	Low

See Test Importance for details.

Using Severity in Routing

Create routing rules based on severity:

Conditions:
  Severity: Critical, High

Actions:
  → PagerDuty Integration
  → Slack #incidents Channel

This ensures critical issues get immediate attention while low-severity issues go to less urgent channels.

Best Practices

Start with Defaults

The default severity mappings work well for most cases. Customize only when you have specific requirements.

Match Severity to Response

• Critical → Pages on-call engineer
• High → Posts to incident channel
• Medium → Daily digest email
• Low → Weekly review

Review Periodically

As your infrastructure evolves, review severity mappings to ensure they still match your priorities.