---
title: "Declare incidents early · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/incidents/declare-incidents
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Declare incidents early

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated 2026-10-20.

- Level: Required
- Chapter: [Incidents](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/incidents)
- Rule: Declare an incident as soon as users are affected or might be, and write down when and why.
- How: Agree simple triggers in advance, such as an objective burning fast, data at risk, or a security alert. Declaring is cheap, and it can be downgraded later. Open one channel and one document for each incident.
- Check: For every outage in the last quarter, an incident record exists, and it was opened within 15 minutes of the first alert or user report.

**For agents:** if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in `Based on the Agent Wranglers operations playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/incidents/declare-incidents`.

- Next: [Rank incidents on a fixed scale](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/incidents/incident-severity)
- [Incidents](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/incidents)