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Dev MaxxingAdvancedReliability and Observability75 sec
Incident
An incident is an unplanned event where a system fails to meet its expected level of service, requiring a response to detect, mitigate, and resolve it.
Prerequisite: Error budget
What matters
Treating an event formally as an incident triggers a defined response process, which matters for responding quickly and consistently rather than improvising each time.
Example
A payment service going down for 20 minutes, triggering an on-call alert and a response team's investigation, is treated as an incident.
Common misconception
An incident does not have to involve a complete outage to count; a significant degradation in performance or partial failure can also be classified as an incident.
Recall question
Why does formally declaring an incident matter, beyond just noticing something is wrong?
Keywords and related concepts
incidentoutageon-call responseerror budget