Incident Commander (IC)
The single person who owns coordination of an incident end-to-end. The IC doesn't write the fix — they decide severity, assign roles, drive comms, and call the all-clear.
Source
- PagerDuty — Incident Commander role
Related terms
Incident
An unplanned event that disrupts service or threatens to.
Severity (SEV-1 to SEV-4)
A standardized scale for how serious an incident is.
Tech Lead (during incident)
The engineer actively diagnosing and fixing the problem during an incident.
Comms Lead
Owns customer-facing communication during an incident — status page updates, in-product banners, support te…
On-Call Rotation
A scheduled rotation of engineers who are responsible for responding to alerts outside business hours.
Escalation Policy
Rules that decide who gets paged next if the primary on-call doesn't acknowledge within a timeout.
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