Align severities of incidents and infradev to business impact for escalated customers and Dedicated fleet operability

Why is this change being made?

  Update Incident Severities and corresponding infradev severities according to **business impact** on GitLab Dedicated Business, with clear specifics on:

• Fleet wide operability and scalability

• Escalated state customers, with high risk of attrition.

  This should clarify specific, quantifiable situations where there is a need to elevate incident and infradev severity, regardless of customer impact.

  Summary

  This update expands the severity level definitions for incidents and issue triage to include specific criteria for GitLab Dedicated (a hosted, single-tenant product offering).

  For Severity 1 (Critical), the GitLab impact definition now explicitly covers scenarios where the Dedicated fleet experiences severe operational disruption or where high-risk escalated customers face visible service impact. New examples are also added, such as being unable to upgrade the fleet or response capacity becoming overwhelmed.

  For Severity 2 (High), the GitLab impact definition now includes situations where fleet rollouts are blocked for more than a week, or where high-risk Dedicated customers face attrition risk even without visible product impact.

  Similarly, the issue triage severity table is updated so that severity::1 now includes issues that put Dedicated fleet operations at risk or block automated fleet rollouts for over a week, and severity::2 formatting is slightly cleaned up for clarity.

  In short, these changes ensure that problems specifically affecting the Dedicated product line are clearly accounted for when teams decide how urgently to respond to an incident or prioritize a bug fix.

Author and Reviewer Checklist

Please verify the check list and ensure to tick them off before the MR is merged.

• Provided a concise title for this Merge Request (MR)
• Added a description to this MR explaining the reasons for the proposed change, per say why, not just what
  • Copy/paste the Slack conversation to document it for later, or upload screenshots. Verify that no confidential data is added, and the content is SAFE
• Assign reviewers for this MR to the correct
  • The when to get approval handbook section explains when DRI approval is required
  • The who can approve handbook section explains how to identify the DRI
  • If the MR does not require DRI approval, consider asking someone on your team, such as your manager.
  • The approver may merge the MR. If they approve but don't merge, you can merge.
• For transparency, share this MR with the audience that will be impacted.
  • Team: For changes that affect your direct team, share in your group Slack channel
  • Department: If the update affects your department, share the MR in your department Slack channel
  • Division: If the update affects your division, share the MR in your division Slack channel
  • Company: If the update affects all (or the majority of) GitLab team members, post an update in #whats-happening-at-gitlab linking to this MR
    • For high-priority company-wide announcements work with the internal communications team to post the update in #company-fyi and align on a plan to circulate in additional channels like the "While You Were Iterating" Newsletter

Commits

• Align severities of incidents and infradev to business impact and customer escalation.

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