Glossary for incident teams
Short, practical definitions for the language of on-call, alerting, SLAs, and status communication—aligned with how All Quiet thinks about operations.
28 new glossary terms in the last 31 days
Last updated: Tuesday, 12 May 2026
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On-Call & Operations Published
Alert Fatigue
Mental exhaustion and desensitization caused by too many noisy, non-critical alerts.
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On-Call & Operations Published
Alert Management
The practice of organizing, filtering, and routing alerts so signal stays high and noise—and alert fatigue—stays low.
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Monitoring & Integrations Published
Alert Payload
A collection of data that provides detailed information about an alert generated by a monitoring tool.
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Monitoring & Integrations Published
API Monitoring
Oversee APIs to ensure their performance, availability, and functional correctness.
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On-Call & Operations Published
Blameless Culture
A blameless culture focuses on systemic failures rather than individual error during incident reviews, improving transparency and learning.
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New Incident Response Frameworks Published
Bug
A bug is an error or flaw in software that produces incorrect behavior—from minor UI issues to production-breaking defects that may trigger formal incident response.
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New Incident Response Frameworks Published
Bug vs. Incident
Bugs are specific code defects; incidents are broader service disruptions—not every bug becomes an incident, and not every incident traces to a bug.
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New On-Call & Operations Published
CD (Continuous Deployment)
Continuous Deployment releases every change that passes automated tests straight to production—demanding strong observability and incident management guardrails.
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On-Call & Operations Published
ChatOps
ChatOps connects people, tools, and processes through a central chat interface so engineers can operate without leaving Slack or Teams.
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New On-Call & Operations Published
CI (Continuous Integration)
Continuous Integration automates merging and testing developer changes frequently—the first half of CI/CD that catches regressions soon after commits land.
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On-Call & Operations Published
CI/CD
CI/CD is a modern software development practice that automates the integration, testing, and delivery of code to production environments.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
CPU Utilization
CPU utilization is the share of processor capacity in use; sustained highs can cause latency spikes or crashes and inform scaling and cost decisions.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
Cron Jobs
Cron jobs schedule recurring background work like backups and cleanups—silent when they fail unless you monitor them with heartbeats or dead-man switches.
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Monitoring & Integrations Published
Data Aggregation
Combining alerts, logs, and metrics from many tools into one unified view for faster incident detection and triage.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
Database
A database is structured electronic storage for application data—from auth to transactions—making its availability and query performance central to production reliability.
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New On-Call & Operations Published
Deployment
A deployment moves a tested build into a target environment such as staging or production—the moment change meets users and monitoring proves critical.
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New On-Call & Operations Published
Deployment Velocity
Deployment velocity measures how often teams ship successfully to production—a DevOps KPI for pipeline health when paired with stability and safe rollback paths.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
Development Environment
A development environment is where engineers write and test code in isolation—optimized for speed and iteration while aiming for parity with higher environments.
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On-Call & Operations Published
DevOps
A culture and practice uniting development and operations to deliver software faster with collaboration, automation, and shared ownership.
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On-Call & Operations Published
DevOps vs. SRE
DevOps is the cultural push for collaboration; SRE is a concrete implementation using reliability metrics, roles, and engineering practices.
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On-Call & Operations Published
DND Override
Critical Alerts can bypass silent mode and Focus/DND settings so on-call engineers don’t miss major outages.
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Monitoring & Integrations Published
DNS Monitoring
Tracking DNS record health and performance so misconfigurations, hijacks, or resolver issues are caught before users silently fail to reach you.
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Incident Metrics & SLAs Published
Downtime
Downtime is when a system or service is unavailable or fails its core function—impacting revenue, productivity, and trust.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
Health Check
Health checks probe endpoints or components to confirm a service is reachable and functioning—the ground truth load balancers and incident tooling rely on.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
HTML
HTML structures web pages; for operations it is what external monitors fetch to confirm a site renders—enabling keyword checks beyond a simple TCP or HTTP 200.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
HTTP
HTTP is the protocol behind web communication—how browsers and APIs exchange requests and status codes, including how uptime checks and webhook alerts move over the wire.
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Incident Response Frameworks Published
Incident
An incident is an unplanned disruption or reduction in the quality of an IT service that requires immediate intervention to restore normal operations.
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Incident Response Frameworks Published
Incident Commander
The Incident Commander is the single point of authority coordinating responders, communications, and the incident response framework during outages.
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Incident Response Frameworks Published
Incident Management in ITIL
ITIL is a globally recognized framework that includes clear guidelines for incident management.
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Incident Response Frameworks Published
Incident Management System
Software that centralizes alerts, routes them to on-call staff, and orchestrates detection, response, and resolution.
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Incident Response Frameworks Published
Incident Response Lifecycle
The Incident Response Lifecycle is a set of phases: Detection, Triage, Response, Resolution, and Post-Mortem.
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Incident Response Frameworks Published
Incident Response Plan (IRP)
An Incident Response Plan (IRP) is a documented strategy for detection, containment, and resolution of a service failure.
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Incident Response Frameworks Published
Incident Triage
Triage rapidly evaluates alerts to determine severity, impact, and the appropriate level of response.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
Infrastructure
Infrastructure is the hardware, networks, cloud services, and platform software your applications run on—reliable foundations enable uptime and scale.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Infrastructure as Code treats environments like software—versioned definitions provision servers and networks with repeatability, audits, and CI/CD discipline.
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Incident Response Frameworks Published
IT Operations (ITOps)
ITOps covers the processes and services that keep business technology infrastructure stable, secure, and observable.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
Latency Spike
A latency spike is a sudden increase in network round-trip time—your service stays up but feels slow, often warning of resource strain or infrastructure issues.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
Load Balancing
Load balancing spreads traffic across healthy backend instances—core to high availability, horizontal scale, and draining nodes for maintenance without user impact.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
Monitoring
Monitoring is the continuous process of tracking IT infrastructure health—collecting and analyzing signals so teams detect issues early and automate incident response.
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Incident Metrics & SLAs Published
MTTA
MTTA, also referred to as Mean Time to Acknowledge, is one of the most important incident repsonse metrics.
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Incident Metrics & SLAs Published
MTTA vs. MTTR
The difference between MTTA and MTTR and why both are very important metrics for your incident response.
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Incident Metrics & SLAs Published
MTTC
Mean Time to Control measures how long it takes to contain an incident after detection—limiting blast radius before full resolution.
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Incident Metrics & SLAs Published
MTTR
MTTR, or Mean Time To Resolution, tracks the average time is takes to resolve incidents after they pop up.
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On-Call & Operations Published
On-Call Compensation
Refers to the payment employees receive for being available to work outside their regular hours.
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On-Call & Operations Published
On-Call Management
Refers to the practices that organizations use to handle after-hours support and incident response.
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New Incident Response Frameworks Published
Outage
An outage is when a service or infrastructure is unavailable to users—typically the highest-severity incidents demanding rapid restoration and coordinated response.
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Incident Response Frameworks Published
Post-Mortem Template
A standardized, blameless document for reviewing major incidents: timeline, root cause, and actions to prevent recurrence.
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Monitoring & Integrations Published
Production Environment
The live environment where end-users run your software—the final deployment stage with the strictest stability and security requirements.
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Incident Response Frameworks Published
Production Incident
An unplanned disruption or quality drop in a live customer-facing service, usually treated as highest severity.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
Real-Time Monitoring
Real-time monitoring delivers near-instant visibility into production systems—critical when seconds of undetected failure carry major operational or financial risk.
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New Incident Response Frameworks Published
Regressions
A regression is a bug that breaks something that used to work after a code change or deployment—requiring fast detection and incident response when it hits production.
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New Incident Response Frameworks Published
Rollbacks
A rollback reverts software or data to a last-known-good state after a bad deployment—often the fastest way to restore service and shrink incident blast radius.
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Incident Response Frameworks Published
Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a systematic process to identify the underlying failure behind an incident and prevent recurrence.
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On-Call & Operations Published
Runbook
A step-by-step set of standardized procedures responders follow to diagnose and resolve specific incidents.
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On-Call & Operations Published
Runbook vs. Playbook
Runbooks are tactical step-by-step technical procedures; playbooks are broader strategic guides for coordinating organizational response.
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On-Call & Operations Published
Sailboat Retrospective
An Agile reflection format using wind, anchor, island, and iceberg metaphors to surface strengths, blockers, and hidden risks.
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Incident Response Frameworks Published
SecOps
SecOps embeds security into daily IT operations so protection is continuous—not a final gate before release.
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Incident Metrics & SLAs Published
Service Level Indicator (SLI)
A Service Level Indicator (SLI) is a quantitative measure of service level used to assess system health objectively.
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Incident Metrics & SLAs Published
Service Level Objective (SLO)
An internal, measurable reliability target that guides alerting, error budgets, and operational priorities.
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Incident Response Frameworks Published
Severity Levels (SEV)
Severity levels (SEV) rank the business impact of an incident and dictate the urgency of the response.
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Incident Metrics & SLAs Published
SLA (Service Level Agreement)
A formal commitment that defines expected service levels, responsibilities, and consequences when targets are missed.
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New Incident Response Frameworks Published
SME (Subject Matter Expert)
A Subject Matter Expert brings deep specialized knowledge during incidents—often the fastest path to a safe fix when commanders escalate past first responders.
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New On-Call & Operations Published
Software Development
Software development spans design, coding, testing, and maintenance across the SDLC—modern DevOps extends ownership through production operations and reliability.
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On-Call & Operations Published
SRE
An engineering discipline that applies software practices to operations—using SLOs, error budgets, and automation to run reliable systems at scale.
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New Monitoring & Integrations Published
Staging Environment
A staging environment mirrors production for final validation—load tests, integrations, and UAT—catching environment-specific issues before customers see them.
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Monitoring & Integrations Published
Status Pages
Providing live updates on the health and performance of a company’s services, systems, or applications.
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