Observability Glossary

Incident

An incident is like a surprise party that no one wants. It's when something unexpected happens in your app, like a sudden increase in error rates or a service going down. Imagine you're running a web app, and suddenly, users start reporting that they can't log in—that's an incident. You need to take immediate action to restore the service.

When an incident occurs, it's crucial to quickly identify the root cause and take action to resolve it. This often involves analyzing telemetry data to understand what went wrong. How you respond to incidents can make a big difference in the overall reliability and resiliency of your application.

By having a solid incident response plan in place you can address incidents fast and minimize their impact on the end user experience.

Explore related concepts

Incident Response

The process of reacting to and resolving unexpected issues or problems within a software system, ensuring that the system returns to a stable and functional state as quickly as possible.

Root Cause Analysis

Root Cause Analysis is the process of identifying the underlying reason for an error or performance issue in an application. It often involving a investigating logs, metrics, traces and wide events to identify the cause of the issue, instead of fixing just its symptoms.

Incident Management

Incident Management is the process of identifying, responding to, and resolving incidents that occur within an application. It involves detecting when something goes wrong, alerting the appropriate teams, working to restore normal operations as quickly as possible, and implementing measures to prevent the same issue to occur in the future.