Implementing integrations without a mountain of technical debt can be challenging. But it doesn’t have to be all bugs, burn out, and outages when shipping integrations at a high volume. We’ve unlocked a pattern at FireHydrant to rapidly build and release integrations without swiping the technical debt credit card each time — and that gave us a fastlane to building premier integrations.

As a former incident responder and now as a responder advocate for FireHydrant, I’ve seen the “build vs. buy” debate play out many times. In fact, I even supported the tool that former employers used for managing incidents for years before they decided to buy (more on that in a future blog post).

An incident can take many forms. It can look like a small issue that locks a few customers out of their accounts or a huge catastrophe that brings down your entire product for a full day. How you respond to the incident should vary based on the impact of the incident. And that’s where severity comes into play. Defined severity levels are crucial to any good incident management program.