Severity & Status
How an issue's triage state and its impact level move independently
Two axes, one issue
Every issue in the feed carries two labels that change independently of each other. Status is the triage axis: where the issue sits in your team’s workflow. Severity is the impact axis: how bad the problem is. A newly created issue starts at status Escalating and severity Medium.
Nothing about either axis moves on its own. Every change is a person picking a new value, and any value can jump straight to any other, in either direction, at any time.
Status: the triage axis
Status has exactly four values.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Escalating | The default for a newly created issue. Nothing has been decided about it yet |
| For review | Flagged for a closer look before someone decides what to do |
| Acknowledged | Confirmed as real |
| Resolved | The underlying problem has been fixed |
These are the same four values you’ll see spelled escalating, for_review, acknowledged, and resolved in the data and filters, just written out for reading here.
Severity: the impact axis
Severity also has exactly four values, describing how bad the problem is: critical, high, medium, and low, with medium as the default for a newly created issue. That’s a different question from the quality scores a trace receives.
Note
Severity is stored as priority on the issue: critical maps to urgent, high to high, medium to medium, and low to low.
Severity is a label your team sets, then filters and sorts by. See Issue fields & filters for the full value table and the feed’s other filterable fields.
How the two axes relate
flowchart TD accTitle: One issue carrying two independent axes, status and severity accDescr: An issue points to a status value and a severity value, tracked independently. ISSUE["Issue"] -->|"triage axis"| STATUS["Status · escalating, for review, acknowledged, resolved"] ISSUE -->|"impact axis"| SEVERITY["Severity · critical, high, medium, low"]
Because the two axes are independent, an issue can sit in any combination of the two. A critical issue can still be sitting at escalating: its impact is as bad as it gets, but no one has picked it up to move it forward yet.
Why it matters
Keeping status and severity separate means status can say nothing about how bad an issue is, and severity can say nothing about where it stands in triage. Collapsing them into one field would lose that distinction, and with it the ability to tell “critical but untouched” apart from “already being worked.”
Keep exploring
Questions & Discussion