Why does this exist?#

Incidents are chaotic by nature. People get paged at 2 AM, adrenaline kicks in, and the temptation is to skip straight to fixing things. But the difference between a well-managed incident and a painful one almost never comes down to technical skill — it comes down to whether the people involved knew their roles, communicated clearly, and followed a process they'd seen before. This documentation exists so that no one on the Polygon team ever has to figure out how to run an incident while they're in one. Every decision about who to page, how to assess severity, when to escalate, and what to communicate has been thought through in advance so you can focus on the problem in front of you instead of the process around it. The goal isn't perfection — it's removing hesitation. If you follow what's here, you will handle the incident well, even if it's your first time.

What is this?#

A collection of pages detailing how to efficiently deal with any major incidents that might arise, along with information on how to go on-call effectively. It provides lessons learned the hard way, along with training material for getting you up to speed quickly.

Who is this for?#

It is intended for on-call practitioners and those involved in an operational incident response process, or those wishing to enact a formal incident response process.

What is covered?#

Anything from preparing to go on-call, definitions of severities, incident call etiquette, all the way to how to run a postmortem, and providing our postmortem template. We even include our security incident response process.

License#

This documentation is provided under the Apache License 2.0. In plain English that means you can use and modify this documentation and use it both commercially and for private use. However, you must include any original copyright notices, and the original LICENSE file.

The source for this documentation is available on our GitHub. This documentation was originally derived from the PagerDuty Incident Response Docs, and we gratefully credit them for the foundation.