> Term
Incident Triage
The rapid assessment, classification, prioritization, and routing of an operational incident based on user impact, blast radius, severity level, and urgency.
Detailed Explanation
Incident Triage is the critical first phase of operational incident response. It focuses on evaluating the severity, breadth of impact, customer exposure, and urgency of an anomaly to assign appropriate incident commanders, establish communication channels, and determine escalation paths.
Triage is distinct from Incident Containment: triage evaluates WHAT is failing and WHO needs to respond, whereas containment executes tactical interventions to isolate the failure domain and stop immediate damage.
Why It Matters
Prevents under-response to critical outages and avoids over-paging teams for minor glitches, ensuring rapid, focused operational mobilization.
Common Failure Mode
Practical Example
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Production Manifestation
Severity classification matrices (SEV-0 to SEV-2), automated alerting routing in PagerDuty/Opsgenie, and designated Incident Commander assignments.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Incident Triage in short?
The rapid assessment, classification, prioritization, and routing of an operational incident based on user impact, blast radius, severity level, and urgency.
What is the most common failure mode?
Misclassifying a SEV-0 customer-facing outage as a low-priority SEV-2 issue due to incomplete telemetry, delaying executive notification and response.
AI Summary
The rapid assessment, classification, prioritization, and routing of an operational incident based on user impact, blast radius, severity level, and urgency. Prevents under-response to critical outages and avoids over-paging teams for minor glitches, ensuring rapid, focused operational mobilization.