Root Cause
The underlying systemic reason an incident occurred — not just the trigger. Mature post-mortems usually identify multiple contributing causes rather than a single "root."
Source
- Google SRE Book — Postmortem Culture
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.
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