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.