Answer Key: Incident Response & Postmortems

Back to Exercises

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Exercise 1: Design Incident Response

Question: Design an incident response process. What are the steps?

Answer

Incident Response Process: 1. Detect: Detect incident (monitoring, alerts) 2. Assess: Assess severity and impact 3. Mitigate: Mitigate impact (rollback, scale, etc.) 4. Resolve: Fix root cause 5. Postmortem: Write postmortem, action items

Answer: Detect → Assess → Mitigate → Resolve → Postmortem.

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Exercise 2: Write Postmortem

Question: Write a postmortem for a hypothetical incident. What's included?

Answer

Postmortem Sections: 1. Timeline: Incident timeline 2. Impact: Users affected, duration 3. Root cause: Root cause analysis 4. Actions: Action items to prevent recurrence 5. Learnings: Key learnings

Answer: Timeline, impact, root cause, action items, learnings.

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Exercise 3: Handle Incident

Question: Your service is down. How do you respond? What's the process?

Answer

Response Process: 1. Acknowledge: Acknowledge incident (P0) 2. Assess: Check service health, identify issue 3. Mitigate: Rollback, scale, enable circuit breakers 4. Resolve: Fix root cause 5. Postmortem: Write postmortem

Answer: Acknowledge → Assess → Mitigate → Resolve → Postmortem.