Handle On-Call Incidents

# Handle On-Call Incidents Explain your on-call responsibilities and walk through how you handle an incident from alert to mitigation, communication, recovery, and follow-up. ### Constraints & Assumptions - Prioritize user impact and safety over proving a theory. - Distinguish mitigation from root-cause analysis. - Preserve evidence and use established escalation paths. ### Clarifying Questions to Ask - What services and decisions were you accountable for? - How were severity and communication cadence determined? - Who could authorize risky remediation? ```hint Stop the harm first Use the safest reversible action that reduces impact while maintaining a timeline of evidence. ``` ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Triage, severity, ownership, and user-impact assessment. - Safe mitigation, escalation, and communication. - Evidence-preserving diagnosis and recovery verification. - Post-incident actions tied to the failure mechanism. ### Follow-up Questions 1. How do you avoid making an incident worse under pressure? 2. What makes a corrective action strong enough to close?