Incident Response

## "Put the Fire Out" **Incident Response** is the tactical, immediate action taken when things go wrong. It is the firefighter kicking down the door. ### The Lifecycle of Response 1. **Detect (T0)**: Monitoring alerts the team. 2. **Acknowledge**: On-call engineer responds. 3. **Mobilize**: Incident Commander assigned. Channel created. 4. **Triage**: Assess severity (SEV level). 5. **Mitigate**: Stop the bleeding (rollback, scaling). 6. **Resolve**: Restore full service. ### Speed vs. Accuracy The goal of incident response is **Mitigation**, not necessarily fixing the root cause. If a server is crashing, reboot it to get users back online. Debug *why* it crashed later (in the Post-Incident Review). **Want to understand the difference between incident response and incident management?** [Read our deep dive: Incident Management vs Incident Response — What Teams Get Wrong](/blog/incident-management-vs-incident-response).