Incident remediation glossary
Definitions for the words that come up when production breaks and someone has to fix it. Each term has a short definition here and, where it earns one, a full page with an explanation, an example from a real failure, the questions people ask about it, and how DataAgent handles it. The definitions stand on their own, and the product sections are marked so you can skip them. Entries are dated and updated when the term or the product changes.
Remediation and autonomous SRE
- Approval gates
An approval gate is a checkpoint in an automated workflow where a proposed action is held until a condition is met: a human approves it, a policy allows it, or a confidence threshold is reached.
- Auto-remediation
Auto-remediation (automated remediation) is the execution of a corrective action on a production system by software rather than by a person, triggered by a detected fault.
- Automated root cause analysis
Automated root cause analysis (automated RCA) is the use of software to identify the underlying cause of a production incident by correlating symptoms with system state, configuration changes and dependencies, and producing an explanation with supporting evidence.
- Autonomous SRE (AI SRE)
An autonomous SRE, also called an AI SRE, is a software agent that performs the site reliability work an on-call engineer used to do: reading the state of the application and its infrastructure during an incident, forming a diagnosis, executing a remediation within set guardrails, and verifying the outcome.
- Blast radius
Blast radius is the extent of a system that a failure, a change or a remediation action can affect: which workloads, namespaces, clusters, cloud resources, users or data are reachable from it.
- Incident remediation
Incident remediation is the set of actions that return a production system to a healthy, verified state after a failure.
- Remediation vs mitigation
Mitigation is an action that reduces or stops the user-facing impact of an incident without necessarily addressing its cause.
- Runbook automation
Runbook automation is the execution of a predefined operational procedure (a runbook) by software, triggered by an alert, a schedule or an operator, instead of by an engineer following the steps by hand.
Incident management and metrics
- MTTR
MTTR (mean time to resolution, repair, respond or recover) is the average elapsed time between the start of an incident and the point the chosen definition treats as its end, measured across incidents in a period.
Kubernetes troubleshooting
- CrashLoopBackOff
CrashLoopBackOff is a Kubernetes pod status that means a container has exited repeatedly and the kubelet is delaying the next restart, doubling the wait each time up to five minutes.
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