Handling Incidents And Outages

Why this matters

Incidents are unavoidable. How you handle them determines customer trust, uptime, and the team's stress levels. Platform Engineers are often first responders: you triage, mitigate, coordinate, and learn. Solid incident practices shorten downtime, reduce impact, and prevent repeats.

• Real tasks: on-call response, service rollback, failover, paging the right owners, posting customer updates, coordinating engineers, and leading post-incident reviews.
• Outcomes: faster time-to-detect (TTD), time-to-mitigate (TTM), clearer communications, and actionable improvements.

Concept explained simply

Handling incidents is structured problem-solving under pressure. You do the minimum effective action to reduce impact, tell people what's happening, then dig deeper once things are stable.

Mental model: "Stabilize, then analyze"

• Stabilize: Stop the bleeding. Roll back, fail over, rate-limit, or disable a feature flag.
• Communicate: Set expectations. Say what's impacted, what you're doing, and when you'll update next.
• Analyze: After stability, find contributing factors and fix them for good.

Core workflow

1. Detect – Alerts or reports indicate a problem. Verify signal with a quick dashboard glance.
2. Declare and classify – Create an incident, set a severity (e.g., Sev1–Sev4), open an incident channel, and assign roles.
3. Triage – Isolate scope (which services/regions), identify recent changes, and form a hypothesis.
4. Mitigate – Apply safe, reversible actions to reduce impact. Prefer rollbacks and config toggles.
5. Communicate – Post clear updates internally and externally with next-update time.
6. Recover – Return to normal state with checks and validation.
7. Learn – Capture timeline, contributing factors, and follow-ups with owners and deadlines.

Worked examples

Tooling essentials (agnostic)

• On-call and paging: escalation policies, timeouts, backup rotations.
• Runbooks: first 5 minutes, rollback steps, failover steps, known issues.
• Dashboards: golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) and per-service health.
• SLOs and error budgets: guide severity and change freezes.
• Incident channel template: auto-create channel with pinned checklist.
• Post-incident template: timeline, contributing factors, action items with owners and due dates.

Communication templates

INC-#### | Severity: Sev2 | Owner (IC): Name
Impact: Users seeing 5xx in API
Start time: 14:05 UTC
Next update: 14:25 UTC
Roles: IC, Comms, Ops, SME
Actions underway: rollback of service X

Update at 14:10 UTC: Elevated 5xx tied to service X deploy. Rollback in progress. Impact: ~10% API requests failing. Next update 14:25 UTC.

We're addressing increased errors affecting some API requests. A fix is being applied. We will provide another update by 14:30 UTC.

Exercises

Do these hands-on tasks. They mirror the exercises below.

1. ex1 — Create a one-page incident runbook stub
   • Define severity levels, first 5 minutes checklist, rollback steps for one service, escalation contacts, and a status update template.
2. ex2 — Triage a sudden 5xx spike
   • Given metrics and a recent change, decide the likely cause, immediate mitigation, next diagnostics, and write a first update message.

Common mistakes and how to self-check

• Delaying incident declaration. Fix: If in doubt, declare low severity; you can downgrade later.
• Chasing root cause before mitigation. Fix: Stabilize first with safe actions.
• Vague communications. Fix: Always include impact, action, and next update time.
• No ownership. Fix: Assign Incident Commander and Comms explicitly.
• Skipping timeline. Fix: Jot timestamps as you go; you'll need them later.
• Over-correcting with risky changes. Fix: Prefer rollbacks, toggles, and traffic shifts.

Practical projects

• Build a service runbook: include severity matrix, first 5 minutes, rollback and failover steps, and comms templates.
• Run a 30-minute game day: simulate a bad deploy, practice rollback, write two updates, and capture a timeline.
• Create a "last 24h changes" dashboard: deploys, config toggles, and schema changes to speed triage.

Learning path

1. Define severities and communication cadences for your team.
2. Create and test a first 5 minutes checklist.
3. Add rollback and feature flag procedures to runbooks.
4. Instrument golden signals and connect alerts to on-call.
5. Practice with a monthly incident drill and iterate on gaps.

Who this is for

• Platform Engineers and SREs participating in on-call.
• Backend Engineers who own services in production.
• Engineering Managers who coordinate incident response.

Prerequisites

• Basic understanding of your stack (HTTP, services, databases, queues).
• Familiarity with monitoring/alerting and dashboards.
• Ability to deploy/rollback (CI/CD and feature flags).

Next steps

• Expand runbooks to include disaster recovery and regional failover.
• Introduce canary releases and progressive delivery to reduce blast radius.
• Adopt blameless post-incident reviews with clear action owners and deadlines.

Mini challenge

In 15 minutes, draft a severity matrix and a first 5 minutes checklist for one service you own. Keep it to one page. Share it with a teammate to validate.

Quick Test

Take the quick test below to check your understanding. Everyone can take it for free. Progress is saved only for logged-in users.