INCIDENT-COMMAND

SRE / DevOps concept Incident Command System.

Definition

The Incident Command System (ICS), adapted from FEMA to SRE by PagerDuty and Atlassian, formalises roles during a major incident: Incident Commander (IC, decider), Comms Lead (communicates internally and externally), Operations Lead (debug), Scribe (timeline). Allows scaling response beyond a single on-call.

Origin

FEMA model from 1970s, adapted to tech by PagerDuty in the PagerDuty Incident Response Guide.

Example in context

EDI incident: all US retail blocked on mapping. IC = SRE lead, Comms = customer success, Ops = EDI tech, Scribe = junior. Channel #incident-2026-05-14-edi.

Related terms

• Postmortem blameless — post-IC exercise.