Engineering / Free editable template

On-call incident response flowchart template

An incident response flowchart tells the person holding the pager exactly what to do in the first ten minutes, and who takes over after that. This swimlane example covers acknowledging the alert, deciding severity, declaring an incident, mitigating the problem, customer updates and booking the postmortem.

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On-call incident response flowchart example showing lanes for on-call, incident commander and comms, severity decision with sev1 to sev3 examples, mitigation loop and customer update cadence
Everything in this example is editable. Replace the labels, move the shapes and adapt the layout to your work.

How to use this template

  1. Write your own severity levels

    Replace the table with severity definitions your team already uses, tied to customer impact rather than technical symptoms. The decision diamond only works if anyone on the rota can make the call in under a minute.

  2. Name the roles, not the people

    Keep the lanes as roles such as incident commander, because the rota changes weekly. Add a lane for support or engineering leadership if they join every SEV1 at your company.

  3. Set update intervals you can keep

    Change the 30-minute customer updates and 15-minute check-ins to intervals your team can sustain at 3am. A promise you miss during an incident does more damage than a longer interval.

Questions about this template

What if one person is both on-call and incident commander?

Merge the on-call and incident commander lanes, or keep both and put the same name on each so the coordination steps stay visible.

Do I need an account to use it?

No. Open the template and edit it in your browser. Your work saves on this device. An account is optional if you want to sync your workspace.

Can I export the finished diagram?

Yes. Use Export in the editor to save a PNG, SVG or PDF, or download an editable .epicdraw backup.

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