Incident Management: Scenario-Based Questions

Incidents are inevitable in complex systems. A strong response plan and blameless postmortem process turn failure into learning — minimizing downtime and improving resilience over time.

🚨 Key Elements of an Incident Playbook

• Severity Classification: Define SEV-1 to SEV-4 with clear impact scopes.
• Escalation Paths: Auto-paging, Slack alerts, rotation policies.
• Roles: Incident Commander, Scribe, Comms Lead, Domain Experts.
• Templates: Pre-filled response steps, checklists, comms guides.
• Runbooks: Recovery and diagnostic procedures per service.

📢 Communication Best Practices

• Use dedicated channels (#incident-1234) with summary pins.
• Keep stakeholders informed via status page updates.
• Log timestamps of actions for postmortem analysis.

🧾 Postmortem Culture

• Blamelessness: Focus on systems and process failures, not individuals.
• Five Whys: Root cause analysis through iterative questioning.
• Action Items: Concrete remediations with owners and deadlines.
• Sharing: Make postmortems visible org-wide to promote learning.

📌 Metrics to Track

• MTTA (Mean Time to Acknowledge)
• MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve)
• Postmortem publication time
• Reoccurrence of similar incident classes

🛠️ Tools & Frameworks

• PagerDuty, Opsgenie, FireHydrant for alerting & coordination
• Statuspage.io, Atlassian Postmortem templates
• SLO dashboards with Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic

🚫 Common Pitfalls

• Skipping root cause analysis after resolution.
• Failure to follow up on action items.
• Reassigning blame to “human error” without deeper analysis.

📌 Final Insight

The best engineering cultures don’t fear outages — they evolve through them. A strong IR and postmortem culture builds trust, transparency, and long-term operational excellence.