SRE Best Practices Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published May 3, 2026 4 min read

The Revenue-Impact Incident Classifier

Some incidents matter more than others to the business. The classifier that maps incident impact to revenue, and the conversations it enables.

The model

Per service: estimated revenue per minute. Based on traffic, conversion rate, average order value.

Per failure mode: percentage of revenue affected. Total outage = 100%; partial degradation = 30-60%.

Cross the two: dollars per minute of incident.

Each incident gets a revenue impact figure post-resolution. 'This 45-minute outage cost ~$120k.'

The figure is in the postmortem. Stakeholders see the cost; investment decisions become rational.

Aggregated quarterly. Total incident cost vs reliability investment. The ROI is visible.

False precision. The figures are estimates; treat them as ranges, not exact numbers.

Optimising for the metric rather than reliability. The metric is a proxy; not a target.

Public shaming. Revenue impact is a leadership conversation, not a team-shaming tool.