Incident Cost Tracking: Make the Pain Visible

Incidents cost real money. The tracking that makes it visible to leadership.

Cost model

Direct: lost revenue (transactions × failure window).

Indirect: engineering time (hours × rate × engineers involved).

Reputational: harder to quantify; track customer churn correlated.

Dashboard

Per quarter: total incident cost, by service, by team.

Trends over time; investment decisions follow.

Avoid

False precision. Estimates within 20-30% are fine; exact numbers mislead.

Using the metric to shame teams. It's for leadership decisions, not punishment.