> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.spectate.net/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Severity levels

> Understand the severity of an incident.

To make it easier to understand the severity of an incident, we have created a severity scale.

## What severity is assigned to an incident?

Based on the check that failed, the severity is assigned to the incident. For example, if a certificate is expiring in 14 days, the severity is `Medium`. If the service is unreachable, the severity is `Critical`.

A list of severities and their check types can be found below.

| Check                               | Severity |
| ----------------------------------- | -------- |
| Uptime heartbeat                    | Critical |
| SSL certificate expired             | Critical |
| Domain expired                      | High     |
| Hard performance threshold exceeded | Medium   |
| Median performance increased        | Medium   |
| Domain expires soon                 | Low      |
| SSL certificate expires soon        | Low      |

## Severity scale

| Severity | Description                                                                                                                                              |
| -------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Critical | The service is unreachable or unusable. For example, two consecutive heartbeats of an HTTPS monitor failed.                                              |
| High     | Impact on the service related to the incident is noticeable and requires action.                                                                         |
| Medium   | This severity is important, but does not immediately impact service availability. It is assigned to incidents such as a certificate expiring in 14 days. |
| Low      | Events that happened, but do not impact service availability directly. For example when a certificate change was detected.                               |
| None     | Purely informational, used by i.e. resolved notifications.                                                                                               |