MessageSeverity

MessageSeverity is a classification used in software systems to indicate the urgency, importance, or impact of a message, event, or alert. It informs how the message should be processed, displayed, and maintained, and can influence routing, persistence, and response actions. In logging, notification, and incident management contexts, severity levels help operators distinguish routine information from issues that require attention.

Common implementations define an ordered set of levels such as debug, info, notice or warning, error, and critical or fatal. Some systems also use intermediate levels or numeric scales (for example 0–5). The exact labels and the numeric mapping are design decisions and should be documented clearly to ensure consistent interpretation across components and teams. The severity value is typically stored as an enumerated type, a string, or an integer, and is often decoupled from the message content to support machine processing and routing.

Best practices include establishing a well-defined, consistent severity taxonomy, avoiding excessive granularity, and aligning severity with intended action thresholds (for example, only critical issues should trigger high-priority alerts). Messages should carry both a severity and a descriptive message to facilitate automation and human review. It is important to standardize severity across systems to enable interoperability in distributed environments and to support policy-based alerting and escalation.

In practice, severity guides user-facing signaling (colored indicators or alert banners), alerting pipelines, and incident response workflows. Lower-severity messages may be logged or displayed with minimal disruption, while higher-severity messages may initiate paging, ticket creation, automated remediation, or on-call escalation. See also logging level, alerting, and incident management.