DevOps For Dummies



Chapter 17

Preparing for Incidents

IN THIS CHAPTER

Minimizing the processes that lead to human error

Improving on-call response

Managing incidents when they occur

Measuring your success

What’s an incident or service outage? Good question! Essentially, an incident is any technical disruption of your business. Incidents come in all shapes, sizes, and severities. For example, if your business is banking, members of your financial institution might not be able to access their bank accounts online. If your business is online photo storage, a potential incident might prevent users from uploading new photos. If your business is retail, maybe users can’t make purchases because your payment processor is down.

Sometimes an incident can be rather tame. Perhaps the “Add to Cart” button is duplicating requests and adding two items to customers’ carts instead of one. Irritating, yes. But the situation isn’t dire because the customer can edit the quantity in the cart. Other times, incidents can be much more traumatic. Perhaps your sign-up form is preventing ...