# What is Severity Level?

> A rating of how much harm an issue is causing, from outage to cosmetic.

Canonical: https://www.decimal.app/glossary/severity-level · Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

Severity levels (often SEV1 to SEV4) classify issues by technical and customer impact: data loss and outages at the top, minor cosmetic problems at the bottom.

## Why it matters

Severity decides who gets pulled in and how fast. Inconsistent ratings either wake people up for nothing or leave real problems waiting.

## Best practices

1. Define by impact. Use concrete criteria like users affected and data at risk.
2. Let anyone raise it. Then confirm the level quickly.
3. Separate from priority. Severity is impact; priority is order of work.

## How Decimal helps

Decimal sizes the impact of an issue by checking how many accounts and requests show the same error, giving teams evidence for the severity call.

## Related terms

- [Priority](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/priority): How soon a ticket should be worked, relative to everything else.
- [Incident](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/incident): An unplanned disruption or degradation of a service that needs an urgent response.
- [Service Level Agreement (SLA)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/sla): A contractual commitment on response or resolution times.
- [Engineering Escalation](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/engineering-escalation): A ticket support hands to engineering because it needs code-level investigation.

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