Severities - aciona.me

aciona.me works with a closed set of four severities.

Severity	Typical use	Push
`critical`	Direct customer impact; someone must act now.	✅
`high`	Meaningful degradation; needs prompt attention.	✅
`warning`	A warning sign; can wait for business hours.	✅
`info`	Informational; a record with no urgency.	—

Incidents with info severity do not generate push notifications. Email, Slack and Microsoft Teams are still sent.

Recognized synonyms

Free-form values sent by tools are normalized. Comparison ignores case and whitespace.

Final severity	Accepted values
`critical`	`critical`, `crit`, `fatal`, `emergency`, `page`, `p1`, `sev1`
`high`	`high`, `error`, `err`, `major`, `p2`, `sev2`
`warning`	`warning`, `warn`, `medium`, `minor`, `p3`, `sev3`
`info`	`info`, `information`, `informational`, `notice`, `low`, `debug`, `p4`, `p5`, `sev4`, `sev5`

Missing or unrecognized values fall back to warning.

Mapping per tool

Prometheus / Grafana
Datadog
New Relic
Zabbix
CloudWatch

Taken from the severity label. Without it, warning.

labels:
  severity: critical
  service: payments-api

Taken from the monitor priority ($ALERT_PRIORITY):

Priority	Severity
`P1`	`critical`
`P2`	`high`
`P3`	`warning`
`P4`, `P5`	`info`

With no priority, the alert type is used as a fallback.

Taken from priority:

`priority`	Severity
`CRITICAL`	`critical`
`HIGH`	`high`
`MEDIUM`	`warning`
`LOW`	`info`

Taken from the numeric event priority:

Zabbix	Severity
5 — Disaster	`critical`
4 — High	`high`
3 — Average	`warning`
2 — Warning	`warning`
1 — Information	`info`
0 — Not classified	`info`

CloudWatch has no native severity. The transform Lambda resolves it in layers:

A marker in AlarmDescription: [severity:critical]
A keyword in the alarm name: critical, high, warning, info
Default: warning

Best practices

Reserve critical for what wakes someone up

If everything is critical, nothing is. Severity should answer: “does this justify pulling someone out of bed?”.

Use info for things that are only a record

Deploys, successful job runs and configuration changes get recorded without generating push.

Standardize across tools

If Grafana uses critical and Datadog uses P1, both arrive as critical — but aligning the vocabulary makes life easier for whoever reads the alert.

​Recognized synonyms

​Mapping per tool

​Best practices

Recognized synonyms

Mapping per tool

Best practices