Incident
GlossaryWritten by Burak YReviewed by Burak YLast reviewed 3 September 2026
An event that disrupts or threatens service operation and requires coordinated investigation or response. An incident is not the same thing as an alert: an alert is a signal, while an incident is the coordinated work of understanding and containing what the signal represents. One incident may gather many alerts, and many alerts may produce no incident at all.
In practice
Forty alerts fire when a shared cache fails. They belong to one incident with one owner, one timeline and one communication thread — not forty parallel investigations.