Handoff
GlossaryWritten by Burak YReviewed by Burak YLast reviewed 3 September 2026
Structured transfer of ownership, context, and risk between responders or teams. A handoff that moves only the pager leaves the incoming responder to rediscover active incidents, temporary mitigations, suppressed alerts and recent changes on their own — usually at the worst possible moment.
In practice
The outgoing responder has manually failed traffic away from one region and muted its alerts. Without that in the handoff, the incoming responder spends the night investigating an outage that is already mitigated.