Incident response reality for 2–5 person teams
Big tech companies have 24/7 Security Operations Centers. Tiny teams don’t. For a startup with 2–5 engineers, incident response must be lean, pragmatic, and sustainable.
Common realities:
- No dedicated SRE or on-call engineer.
- Incidents interrupt feature work.
- Documentation is often missing or outdated.
- Fatigue sets in if one person always takes the hit.
The goal is not perfection but minimizing downtime, reducing chaos, and learning after each incident.
Classification and triage: severity levels that make sense
Avoid complex severity matrices—keep it simple:
- SEV-1 → System-wide outage, customer-facing impact. Immediate all-hands.
- SEV-2 → Major feature broken, but workarounds exist. Urgent but not “drop everything.”
- SEV-3 → Minor bugs, degraded performance. Fix during work hours.
This keeps alerts actionable. If everything is SEV-1, nothing is.
On-call rotation strategies for small teams
Tiny teams can’t copy enterprise on-call models. The focus should be fairness and sustainability.
Burnout prevention and sustainable schedules
- Rotate weekly (not daily). One person owns incidents per week.
- Use follow-the-sun if you have global team members.
- Cap night/weekend alerts: Only SEV-1 pages after hours.
Escalation paths when the only expert is unavailable
- Have a primary (on-call) and secondary (backup).
- If neither can respond, define a business fallback (e.g., post a status page update, contact hosting provider).
- Avoid “hero culture.” A system that depends on one person will break.
Essential tooling: monitoring, alerting, communication
Minimal stack for small teams:
- Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, or managed alternatives (Datadog Lite, Better Uptime).
- Alerting: PagerDuty (starter plan), OpsGenie, or free Slack integrations.
- Communication: Dedicated #incident Slack/Discord channel + status page (Statuspage.io, Instatus).
Keep it simple. One tool per function is better than 10 half-configured tools.
Runbooks and documentation: templates that work
A runbook = “When X happens, do Y.”
Example template:
- Trigger: API latency >1s.
- Checks: Ping database, check logs, verify recent deploy.
- Actions: Roll back last release if issue persists >10 min.
- Escalate: Contact secondary engineer.
Store runbooks in your repo (/docs/runbooks/) or Notion. Even rough docs are better than tribal knowledge.
Post-incident reviews without blame culture
Tiny teams can’t afford finger-pointing. A simple blameless PIR (post-incident review) helps learning.
Checklist:
- What happened (timeline)?
- What was the customer impact?
- What worked?
- What failed (monitoring gaps, comms delays)?
- Action items (fixes, automation, docs).
Keep PIRs lightweight (<1 page).
Automation priorities: what to automate first
Focus on high-frequency pain points:
- Automated rollbacks for failed deploys.
- Health checks with auto-restart (systemd, Kubernetes).
- Alert suppression (don’t page for transient errors).
Don’t waste cycles automating rare incidents.
Budget-conscious monitoring: free and cheap tools
- Free: UptimeRobot (50 monitors free), Prometheus + Grafana self-hosted.
- Cheap managed: Better Uptime (~$30/mo), HetrixTools, Checkly.
- Logs: ELK stack (self-hosted) or Papertrail ($7/mo starter).
Prioritize uptime + error rates before deep observability.
Basic legal and compliance considerations
Even small teams face compliance risks:
- GDPR/CCPA: Incident = potential data breach? Notify users/regulators within 72h.
- Contracts/SLAs: Check obligations for downtime notifications.
- Audit trails: Keep incident logs for at least 12 months.
You don’t need lawyers on retainer, but you do need awareness and minimal documentation.
For tiny teams, incident response is about clarity, sustainability, and focus on essentials:
- Simple severity levels.
- Lightweight on-call rotation.
- Minimal but reliable tooling.
- Automation for the most painful steps.
- Blameless learning culture.
With this, even a 3-person startup can respond to outages like a pro.
FAQs
How do we handle 24/7 coverage with only 3 developers?
Don’t. Define SEV-1 only for critical outages and allow SEV-2/3 to wait until business hours.
What’s the fastest win for incident response maturity?
Write your first runbook. Even one page reduces panic during incidents.
Should small startups buy PagerDuty?
Not mandatory—start with Slack alerts or Better Uptime. Upgrade only if paging fatigue grows.
