Let’s talk about Incident Management and Incident Response.
Since the dawn of time—or at least since we started shipping software—incidents happen. Systems fail. Cloud providers experience outages. Edge cases surface. Dependencies behave in ways we didn’t anticipate. Sometimes, it’s simply bad luck.
A mature engineering organization doesn’t aim to eliminate incidents entirely. That’s unrealistic. Instead, the goal is to detect quickly, isolate accurately, resolve efficiently, and learn permanently.
Easier said than done.
Rule #1 of Incident Management: Detection, Detection, Detection
If you can’t detect an issue quickly, everything else suffers:
- Impact increases
- Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) grows
- Customer trust erodes
- Teams react chaotically instead of responding methodically
Effective detection enables teams to:
- Understand blast radius
- Prioritize correctly
- Decide whether automation, human intervention, or escalation is required
Without detection, you’re flying blind.
Best Practices for Monitoring & Issue Detection
1. Understand the Application End-to-End
Work directly with application teams to understand:
- The full request and data flow
- Internal and external dependencies
- Single points of failure
- Critical paths
This context allows you to monitor what actually matters, not just CPU graphs and generic infrastructure metrics.
2. Align on SLAs and SLOs (Collaboratively)
Monitoring cannot exist in isolation.
- SLAs and SLOs must be defined collaboratively with Product and Business stakeholders
- DevOps and SRE teams then translate these into:
- Error budgets
- Alert thresholds
- Scaling strategies
Without this alignment, alerts either become meaningless noise—or dangerously silent.
3. Design Scaling With Intent (and Cost Awareness)
Auto-scaling is powerful—and expensive if misused.
Before enabling it:
- Understand SLO requirements
- Account for warm-up and cooldown periods
- Ensure scale-down behavior is aggressive but safe
- Tie scaling decisions to user impact, not raw utilization
SLOs should drive scaling behavior—not the other way around.
4. Favor Auto-Healing First
The best incident is the one no human ever joins.
Examples include:
- Restarting unhealthy services
- Replacing failed nodes
- Expanding disk automatically (with guardrails)
- Retrying transient failures with exponential backoff
- Failing fast and redirecting traffic when possible
Be careful with retries. Poorly implemented retry logic can self-inflict denial-of-service during an incident.
When Detection and Auto-Healing Aren’t Enough
If alarms persist and automation fails, it’s time to act.
1. Review Logs (Good Logging Is Non-Negotiable)
Effective incident response assumes:
- Structured logs
- Clear and actionable error messages
- Correlation or trace IDs
- Proper retention and accessibility
If logs aren’t useful during an incident, that’s a pre-incident failure that must be addressed.
2. Use RED Metrics to Identify Pain Points
Teams should be able to quickly analyze:
- Rate (traffic)
- Errors
- Duration (latency)
RED metrics help pinpoint where degradation is occurring—not just that it exists.
3. Coordinate, Communicate, and Document
When necessary:
- Get the right people on a call
- Designate a scribe
- Document everything attempted:
- What worked
- What didn’t
- Why decisions were made
Failed remediation attempts are just as valuable as successful ones.
Post-Incident: Where Real Improvement Happens
This is the most important phase of incident management—second only to proper observability.
Post-Mortem / RCA Best Practices
1. Hold the RCA Quickly
Conduct the post-mortem within 24 hours whenever possible. Details fade quickly, and context is lost faster than teams expect.
2. No Blame. Ever.
An RCA is not a performance review.
- No finger-pointing
- No shaming
- No public discipline
If malicious behavior or habitual negligence is discovered, that is handled outside the RCA process.
3. Clearly Document Impact
Capture:
- User impact
- Business impact
- Duration and severity
Perception often differs from reality. Both must be acknowledged and reconciled.
4. How Was the Incident Discovered?
This is a critical signal.
- Customer complaint?
- Monitoring alert?
- Internal observation?
- Pure luck?
Each answer reveals strengths—or gaps—in your detection strategy.
5. Timeline Analysis & Core Metrics
Every RCA should capture:
- When the issue actually started
- When it was first detected
- When remediation began
- When service was fully restored
You should consistently track:
- MTTD (Mean Time to Detect)
- Detection Latency
- MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve)
Reducing detection latency is often the highest-leverage reliability improvement an organization can make.
6. Evaluate What Worked—and What Didn’t
Explicitly document:
- Successful detection signals
- Effective mitigations
- Failed assumptions
- Tooling or process gaps
This is where real learning happens.
7. Action Items Are Mandatory
Every RCA must produce:
- Concrete action items
- Clear owners
- Tracking via tickets or backlog items
- Treatment as Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs)
An RCA without follow-through is just a meeting.