Incident response SOP template — IT helpdesk workflow
Stop losing time to confusion during incidents. This interactive SOP guides your team through detection, triage, escalation, and resolution with a clear step-by-step process — even at 3am when the usual expert isn't available.
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Who is this for?
IT managers, DevOps teams, SRE leads, and helpdesk coordinators who need to standardise how their team responds to outages, security events, hardware failures, and service disruptions — especially across shifts and on-call rotations.
The problem it solves
During incidents, the last thing your team needs is to debate the process. But without a clear SOP, every incident is handled differently depending on who's on call. Steps get skipped, stakeholders aren't notified, and post-mortems reveal the same gaps repeatedly. An interactive incident response SOP makes the correct process impossible to miss.
How the template is structured
Every step is editable. Customise the content, labels, and branching logic to match your exact process.
Detection and classification — what severity is this?
The first decision node classifies the incident by type (outage, degradation, security, hardware) and severity (P1 critical, P2 major, P3 minor). Severity classification immediately determines the escalation path and required response time.
Immediate triage — contain the impact
Specific triage steps per incident type. For P1 outages: notify on-call lead, post status page update, open incident channel. For security events: isolate affected systems, preserve logs, notify security lead. Each step is actionable and clearly owned.
Escalation — who needs to know?
The escalation branch determines which stakeholders to notify and when. P1 incidents trigger executive notification within 15 minutes. P2 incidents notify department heads. P3 incidents are handled within normal support channels with no executive escalation.
Resolution procedures — fix the problem
Resolution steps branch by incident type. Common issues (service restart, cache clear, certificate renewal) have self-contained runbook steps. Unfamiliar issues route to the specialist escalation path with full context already captured.
Post-incident — review and document
Once resolved, the SOP guides the team through the post-incident process: confirm resolution with affected stakeholders, update status page, schedule post-mortem, and log the incident timeline. Nothing gets forgotten in the relief of resolution.
What you get with this template
Handle every incident the same way — every time
Free to use. Customise every node, label, and branch in PathPilot's visual canvas. Publish with one click.
Get started freeFrequently asked questions
- Can I have different resolution paths for different incident types?
- Yes. PathPilot's branching lets you create completely separate resolution paths for outages, security events, hardware failures, and third-party service issues — all within one flow. The first decision node routes to the correct branch.
- Can I use this for compliance documentation?
- Yes. PathPilot's audit log records every change to the flow with a timestamp and editor name. For compliance reviews, you can export the audit log alongside the published flow to demonstrate that your documented SOP matches what was in use at the time of an incident.
- Can I trigger PagerDuty or Opsgenie alerts from the flow?
- Yes. PathPilot webhooks fire when specific nodes are reached. You can trigger a PagerDuty alert, create a Jira incident ticket, or post to a Slack channel the moment someone classifies an incident as P1 in the flow.
- How do I keep this SOP up to date as our infrastructure changes?
- Changes to a PathPilot flow take effect immediately for everyone using the public link — there's no re-publishing a PDF or notifying the team of a new version. Edit, save, and everyone gets the updated process in real time.