Incident Commander

Incident Commander

Classify incident severity, reconstruct timelines from heterogeneous event sources, and generate structured post-incident reviews with root cause analysis and action items. Codifies PagerDuty, Google SRE, and Atlassian incident-management practices into severity scoring, escalation matrices, communication templates, RCA frameworks, and SLA/error-budget tracking.

Core Capabilities

• Severity classification — multi-dimensional scoring (revenue, user scope, data/security risk, service criticality, blast radius) into SEV-1 to SEV-4 with confidence and escalation paths.
• Timeline reconstruction — chronological timelines from logs, alerts, Slack, and deploy events with phase detection and gap analysis.
• Post-incident review — PIRs with 5 Whys, Fishbone, Timeline, or Bow Tie RCA plus categorized action items (owner, priority, deadline).
• Postmortem quality — coverage-gap detection, action-item quality scoring, MTTD/MTTR benchmarking.
• Communication & escalation — severity-specific internal/executive/customer/status-page templates; technical (L1-L4) and business escalation matrices with time-based triggers.
• SLA / error-budget tracking — SLI/SLO/SLA hierarchy, error budgets, burn-rate alerting, and breach handling.

When to Use

• Handling an active incident — classify severity, establish command, mitigate, communicate.
• Running a post-incident review — reconstruct timeline, perform RCA, assign action items.
• Managing escalation — apply technical and business escalation paths by severity and elapsed time.
• Building or auditing response playbooks, comms templates, or SLA/error-budget policy.

Clarify First

Before producing the artifact, confirm these inputs. If any is unknown or vague, ASK — do not assume:

• [ ] Task & deliverable — classify severity, reconstruct a timeline, or generate a PIR/postmortem (selects severity_classifier.py vs timeline_reconstructor.py vs pir_generator.py/postmortem_generator.py)
• [ ] Incident input data — the incident/events JSON with severity dimensions (revenue, user scope, data/security risk, blast radius) (the input the scripts parse)
• [ ] RCA method — 5 Whys, Fishbone, Timeline, or Bow Tie (sets pir_generator.py --rca-method and the postmortem structure)

Stop rule: ask only the 2-3 that most change the output. If the user says "just draft it," proceed and list your assumptions at the top of the artifact.

Tools

| Tool | Purpose | Command |

|------|---------|---------|

| incident_classifier.py | Classify severity, recommend response teams and comms templates | python scripts/incident_classifier.py --input incident.json --format text |

| severity_classifier.py | Multi-dimensional severity score with escalation path | python scripts/severity_classifier.py incident.json --format markdown |

| timeline_reconstructor.py | Reconstruct timeline from timestamped events with phase + gap analysis | python scripts/timeline_reconstructor.py --input events.json --detect-phases --gap-analysis --format markdown |

| incident_timeline_builder.py | Build structured timeline with MTTD/MTTR and comms templates | python scripts/incident_timeline_builder.py incident_data.json --format markdown |

| pir_generator.py | Generate Post-Incident Review with RCA and action items | python scripts/pir_generator.py --incident incident.json --rca-method fishbone --action-items |

| postmortem_generator.py | Generate postmortem with 5-Whys, benchmarks, coverage gaps | python scripts/postmortem_generator.py incident_data.json --format markdown |

References

Load the reference that matches the task — keep this file lean and pull detail on demand:

• references/response-playbooks.md — quick-start commands, the detection-to-resolution and post-incident-review workflows, escalation management, anti-patterns, and tool troubleshooting. Read when running an incident end-to-end or using the scripts.
• references/incident-response-framework.md — PagerDuty/Google SRE/Atlassian framework comparison, role definitions (IC, Comms, Ops, Scribe, SME, Liaison), communication protocols, escalation matrix, and the 7-phase incident lifecycle. Read when designing the response process or assigning roles.
• references/incident_severity_matrix.md — full SEV-1 to SEV-4 impact criteria, response requirements, escalation paths, classification guidelines, decision tree, and examples. Read when classifying or calibrating severity.
• references/communication_templates.md — ready-to-use internal, executive, customer, status-page, escalation, and resolution templates by severity. Read when drafting any incident communication.
• references/rca_frameworks_guide.md — step-by-step 5 Whys, Fishbone, Timeline, and Bow Tie frameworks with templates, selection guidance, and anti-patterns. Read when performing root cause analysis.
• references/sla-management-guide.md — SLI/SLO/SLA hierarchy, error-budget policy, burn-rate alerting, breach handling, and incident-to-SLA mapping with worked examples. Read when assessing or communicating SLA impact.

Scope & Limitations

Covers: severity classification, timeline reconstruction, PIR/postmortem generation, RCA frameworks, escalation matrices, communication templates, and SLA/error-budget tracking. Tools are deterministic stdlib Python (no ML/LLM calls), accepting JSON input and emitting text/JSON/markdown.

Does NOT cover: live monitoring/alerting infrastructure (feeds in from senior-devops), security forensics (see senior-secops), or deployment/rollback execution (see release-orchestrator).

Integration Points

| Skill | Integration |

|-------|-------------|

| senior-devops | Monitoring alerts feed timeline; runbook templates inform playbooks |

| senior-secops | Security incidents auto-escalate to SEV-1; breach indicators trigger SecOps response |

| release-orchestrator | Deployment events feed timeline; rollback data informs release gates |

| senior-architect | Architectural root causes escalate to architecture review |

| code-reviewer | PIR action items route to code review workflows |