Designing an effective incident response process is crucial for maintaining service availability in modern software operations, which often rely on numerous external dependencies and cloud services. This guide emphasizes the importance of defining what constitutes an incident, establishing robust alerting systems, and classifying incidents based on severity to prioritize responses appropriately. The roles of the incident commander and investigator are essential for managing incidents, with the commander supporting and communicating throughout the process while the investigator focuses on resolution. The post-incident phase involves creating a post-incident review to document and learn from the event, as well as establishing follow-up tasks to address root causes. The article suggests using tools like Grafana IRM to streamline incident management and encourages organizations to tailor their response processes based on their specific needs and contexts.