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Cloud Computing & DevOps vocabulary · Reliability and Incidents

Incident

Meaning in cloud computing & devops, with examples

/ˈɪnsɪdənt/nounCore term

In cloud computing & devops, incident means: An unplanned event that disrupts a service or makes it worse for users, such as an outage, a big slowdown or a data problem, and that needs a quick response.

In Turkish: olay, arıza, kesinti olayı

How it is used

Incidents are declared, handled, escalated and resolved. Many companies rate them by severity, such as SEV1 for the most serious. An incident commander coordinates the response, and a postmortem follows.

Example sentences

  1. We declared an incident when checkout errors jumped to 30 percent.

  2. The incident lasted forty minutes and was caused by an expired certificate.

Common collocations

  • declare an incident
  • incident response
  • major incident
  • incident commander
  • resolve an incident
  • outageA period when a service, system or part of it is not working or cannot be reached by users.
  • postmortemA written review after an incident that explains what happened, the impact, the timeline, the root cause and the actions that will stop it happening again.
  • on-callAvailable outside normal hours to respond quickly if an alert or incident happens. Engineers take turns being on call for their services.
  • root causeThe deepest, original reason a problem happened, which, if fixed, stops the same problem from coming back, as opposed to its visible symptoms.
  • runbookA written step-by-step guide for handling a specific task or alert, such as restarting a service or clearing a full disk, so anyone on call can follow it.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Reliability and Incidents

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