Incident command
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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.