What is an incident response SOP for IT teams?

An incident response SOP is a documented procedure for detecting, containing, resolving, and reviewing IT incidents — outages, security breaches, data loss, or system failures. It defines severity levels, assigns roles (incident commander, communications lead, technical responder), specifies notification chains, and outlines post-incident review steps. The goal is to minimize downtime and ensure a consistent, repeatable response.

What are the phases of incident response?

Phase	Actions	Responsible
1. Detection	Monitor alerts, receive user reports, identify the incident	On-call engineer
2. Classification	Assign severity level (P1-P4), categorize incident type	Incident commander
3. Containment	Isolate affected systems, prevent further damage	Technical responder
4. Communication	Notify stakeholders, update status page	Communications lead
5. Resolution	Fix the root cause, restore service	Technical responder
6. Recovery	Verify systems are stable, monitor for recurrence	On-call engineer
7. Post-mortem	Document root cause, identify preventive actions	Incident commander

What severity levels should you define?

Level	Description	Response Time	Example
P1 — Critical	Complete service outage, data breach	Immediate (15 min)	Production database down
P2 — High	Major feature broken, significant user impact	30 minutes	Payment processing failing
P3 — Medium	Minor feature issue, workaround available	4 hours	Report export not formatting correctly
P4 — Low	Cosmetic issue, no business impact	Next business day	Dashboard chart color incorrect

How do you document incident response steps?

Record the actual workflow in your monitoring and ticketing tools using Glyde — acknowledge an alert, create an incident ticket, update the status page, and escalate. The visual SOP ensures any on-call engineer can follow the same process, even at 3 AM.

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This answer is part of our guide to SOPs by role and use case.