Incidents & On-Call

Five Whys

A root-cause analysis technique where you ask "why?" five times in sequence, each answer pointing one level deeper, to reach a systemic cause rather than a symptom.

Source

Lean Enterprise Institute — The Five Whys

Related terms

Incident

An unplanned event that disrupts service or threatens to.

Severity (SEV-1 to SEV-4)

A standardized scale for how serious an incident is.

Incident Commander (IC)

The single person who owns coordination of an incident end-to-end.

Tech Lead (during incident)

The engineer actively diagnosing and fixing the problem during an incident.

Comms Lead

Owns customer-facing communication during an incident — status page updates, in-product banners, support te…

On-Call Rotation

A scheduled rotation of engineers who are responsible for responding to alerts outside business hours.

Start monitoring free — HTTP + Ping checks, 3 regions, no card

The Free plan includes 5 monitors with HTTP and Ping checks from 3 of the 4 probe regions, 5 minute intervals, and email alerts — $0, no credit card, commercial use allowed. Hosted status pages and the fourth region start on Starter ($16/mo); all 8 monitor types unlock on Growth ($40/mo).

HTTP + Ping checks

3 of 4 probe regions (all 4 on paid plans)

No credit card