> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.incident.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Understanding priority, urgency, and severity

In incident.io, there are three concepts that represent the importance of something.

In alerts and escalations, these are **priorities**, which allow you to configure [branches in your escalation path](/on-call/escalation-paths).

When you notify someone about an escalation, that's done with an **urgency**, which determines how a user is notified. Users can configure separate notification settings for high and low-urgency notifications.

Lastly, once you create an incident, that has a **severity**. An incident's severity indicates how significant this incident is. These are kept different from alert priorities, as the way you determine incident severity may differ from the priority of a single alert.

For example, you may have an alert with an urgent *priority* that you want someone to look at immediately, therefore sending them a high *urgency* notification. However, the problem may only be impacting a small part of your application, or a single customer in an edge case, so you deem the incident *severity* to be minor.