Incident Glossary

Browse 7 incident terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

7 Incident Terms

Blameless Retrospective
A post-incident review focused on understanding systemic failures rather than assigning blame to individuals. Participants describe what happened, what they...
Data Breach
An incident where sensitive, protected, or confidential data is accessed, disclosed, or stolen by an unauthorized party. The event that turns a security team's...
Incident Commander
The person who coordinates the response during a production incident -- making decisions, assigning tasks, managing communication, and keeping the response...
Postmortem
A written analysis conducted after a production incident, documenting what happened, why, how it was resolved, and what will be done to prevent recurrence....
Retry Storm
A cascading failure where many clients simultaneously retry failed requests, overwhelming an already struggling service and preventing it from recovering —...
Root Cause Analysis
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a systematic process for identifying the fundamental underlying cause of a problem rather than just addressing its symptoms. In...
Runbook
A documented set of step-by-step procedures for handling specific operational tasks or incidents. Good runbooks include the alert that triggers them,...

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