Test Importance

Importance levels control the maximum severity of issues created by a test.

Overview

Not all tests are equally critical. A failure in production should be treated differently than a failure in a development environment. Importance levels let you:

• Prevent development tests from creating Critical alerts
• Ensure production issues get appropriate attention
• Reduce alert fatigue from non-critical environments

Importance Levels

Level	Max Severity	Use Case
Production	Critical	Production services, customer-facing APIs
Staging	High	Pre-production, staging environments
Development	Medium	Development servers, test environments
Internal	Low	Internal tools, non-critical services

How It Works

The final severity of an issue is calculated as:

Final Severity = min(Category Severity, Importance Ceiling)

Example

A "Service Unavailable" error normally creates a Critical issue. But:

Test Importance	Category Severity	Final Severity
Production	Critical	Critical
Staging	Critical	High
Development	Critical	Medium
Internal	Critical	Low

Configuring Importance

1. Edit or create a test
2. Find the Importance dropdown
3. Select the appropriate level
4. Save the test

New tests default to Production.

Best Practices

Match Environment to Importance

api.example.com         → Production
staging.example.com     → Staging
dev.example.com         → Development
internal-tool.local     → Internal

Use Tags for Additional Context

Combine importance with tags for routing:

• Tag: team-payments → Route to payments team
• Importance: Production → Allow Critical severity

Review Regularly

As services evolve:

• New critical services may need Production importance
• Deprecated services can be downgraded
• Development services moving to production need updates

Severity Configuration

Workspace admins can customize the base severity for each error category in Settings → Severity. The importance level then caps this configured severity.

See Severity Levels for more on configuring base severities.

Related Topics

• Error Categories - Understanding error types
• Severity Levels - Configuring category severities
• Routing Rules - Route based on severity