Unsure of the definition of something we've mentioned, or you've seen somewhere else? We've got you covered with our incident management (and adjacent domains!) glossary of terms:
- Agile: An iterative and collaborative approach to project management and software development that emphasizes flexibility, responsiveness, and continuous improvement.
- Alert: A notification or warning triggered by an event or condition, usually indicating a potential or actual incident.
- Application Programming Interface (API): A set of protocols and tools that enables different software applications to communicate with each other and share data.
- Application Performance Management (APM): The practice of monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing the performance and availability of software applications.
- Architecture: The overall design and structure of a system or application, including its components, modules, and interfaces.
- Artifact: Any product or output of the software development process, such as code, documentation, or test results.
- Automated Testing: The use of software tools and scripts to automate the execution and evaluation of software tests, helping to improve efficiency, reliability, and consistency.
- Availability: The degree to which a system or application is accessible and operational for users, usually measured as a percentage of uptime.
- Backlog: A prioritized list of features, tasks, or bugs that need to be addressed in a software development project.
- Baseline: A starting point or reference for measuring and comparing changes in a system or application, often used for performance, configuration, or compliance purposes.
- Behavior-Driven Development (BDD): An agile software development methodology that emphasizes collaboration and communication between developers, testers, and business stakeholders, using scenarios and examples to define and validate requirements.
- Benchmarking: The process of comparing the performance, quality, or other characteristics of a system or application to industry standards or best practices.
- Branch: A separate version of a software codebase that allows for independent development and testing of new features or changes.
- Build: The process of compiling and packaging software code and other artifacts into a deployable format.
- Business Continuity Planning (BCP): The process of preparing and testing a set of procedures and resources to ensure that a business can continue to operate during and after a disruption or disaster.
- Capacity Planning: The practice of predicting and managing the resources required for a system or application to meet its performance and scalability requirements.
- Change Management: The process of planning, executing, and controlling changes to a system or application, usually involving formalized procedures and documentation to minimize risk and maintain compliance.
- Code Review: A systematic process of evaluating and improving the quality, reliability, and security of software code, often involving peer review, automated tools, and testing.
- Command-Line Interface (CLI): A method of interacting with a software application or operating system through typed commands rather than graphical user interfaces.
- Communication: The exchange of information and feedback between individuals, teams, and stakeholders, often critical for effective collaboration, decision-making, and incident management.
- Compliance: The degree to which a system or application meets established standards, regulations, or policies, often relating to security, privacy, or data protection.
- Configuration Management: The process of tracking and controlling changes to the settings, parameters, and other configuration data for a system or application.
- Continuous Deployment (CD): A software development practice that automates the release of code changes into a production environment, often as part of a continuous integration and delivery pipeline.
- Continuous Delivery (CD): A software development practice that emphasizes rapid and frequent delivery of small, incremental changes to a production environment, often enabled by automation and DevOps practices.
- Continuous Integration (CI): A software development practice that involves automatically building, testing, and integrating code changes on a frequent basis, often as part of a larger development and delivery process.
- Continuous Improvement: An ongoing, incremental process of identifying areas for improvement and implementing changes to increase efficiency, productivity, and quality.
- Control Chart: A graphical representation of process data that helps to monitor and control the variability and performance of a system or process.
- Cost of Downtime: The financial impact of a system or application outage or disruption, including lost revenue, productivity, and customer satisfaction.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A strategy and technology for managing and analyzing customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving customer retention and loyalty.
- Dashboard: A visual representation of key metrics, data, or performance indicators for a system or application, often used to provide real-time status updates and insights.
- Data Analysis: The process of inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data in order to derive insights and support decision-making.
- Database Management System (DBMS): A software application that manages the storage, retrieval, and modification of data in a structured database, using a set of tools and interfaces for users and applications.
- Debugging: The process of identifying and fixing errors or defects in software code or applications, using a range of techniques and tools to locate and resolve issues.
- Deployment: The process of delivering and installing software code and other artifacts into a production environment, often involving testing, quality assurance, and release management.
- DevOps: An approach to software development and delivery that emphasizes collaboration, communication, automation, and continuous improvement between developers and IT operations teams.
- Disaster Recovery (DR): The process of restoring and recovering IT systems and infrastructure in the event of a disaster or outage, often involving planning, testing, and backup and recovery strategies.
- Documentation: The process of creating, maintaining, and distributing written materials and resources, such as manuals, guides, and technical specifications, to support software development and operations.
- Error Budget: A defined and measurable level of acceptable errors or disruptions in a system or application, often used to balance reliability and innovation goals.
- Event Management: The process of monitoring, processing, and responding to system or application events, often involving automated tools and workflows to identify and prioritize incidents.
- Fault Tolerance: The ability of a system or application to continue to operate in the event of hardware or software failures, often achieved through redundancy, backups, and other mitigation strategies.
- Feedback Loop: A process in which information or data is continuously collected and used to adjust or improve a system or process, often used to optimize performance, quality, or customer experience.
- Git: A distributed version control system used to manage software code and other files, allowing multiple developers to collaborate on a project and track changes over time.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The process of defining and managing IT infrastructure and resources using code, allowing for automation, consistency, and reproducibility.
- Incident: An unplanned interruption or degradation of service in a system or application, often resulting in service disruptions, outages, or other negative impacts.
- Incident Response: The process of detecting, investigating, and resolving incidents in a system or application, often involving communication, collaboration, and mitigation strategies.
- Infrastructure Monitoring: The process of continuously monitoring the health and performance of IT infrastructure and resources, often using automated tools and alerts to identify potential issues.
- Integration: The process of combining different systems, applications, or components to work together seamlessly, often involving APIs, middleware, and other integration tools.
- Interoperability: The ability of different systems, applications, or components to work together and exchange data, often achieved through standardization, protocols, and APIs.
- ITIL: A framework of best practices for IT service management, focusing on processes, governance, and service delivery to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and customer satisfaction.
- Jenkins: An open-source automation server used for building, testing, and deploying software code and other artifacts, often integrated with other DevOps tools and platforms.
- Job Scheduling: The process of automating and managing the scheduling and execution of jobs or tasks, often using software tools and workflows to optimize performance and resource utilization.
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Quantifiable measures used to evaluate the performance, effectiveness, and success of a system or process, often used to inform decision-making and continuous improvement.
- Kubernetes: An open-source platform used to manage and orchestrate containerized applications, providing features such as scaling, load balancing, and deployment automation.
- Lean: An approach to process improvement and management that emphasizes minimizing waste, optimizing efficiency, and improving quality, often used in manufacturing and software development.
- Load Testing: The process of simulating and measuring the performance and scalability of a system or application under different levels of load or stress, often used to identify potential bottlenecks or issues.
- Log Analysis: The process of analyzing and interpreting system or application logs to identify potential issues or patterns, often using automated tools and machine learning techniques.
- Metrics: Quantifiable measures used to evaluate and monitor the performance, usage, or other aspects of a system or process, often used to inform decision-making and continuous improvement.
- Microservices: An architectural approach to software development and delivery that emphasizes modular, loosely-coupled, and independently deployable components, often used in cloud and distributed systems.
- Monitoring: The process of continuously observing and measuring the performance and health of a system or application, often using automated tools and alerts to identify potential issues or threats.
- Network Security: The practice of protecting computer networks from unauthorized access or attacks, often involving measures such as firewalls, intrusion detection, and encryption.
- Observability: The degree to which the internal state and behavior of a system or application can be inferred from external outputs, often achieved through logging, monitoring, and tracing.
- On-call: A system or process for assigning responsibility for responding to incidents or problems outside of regular business hours, often involving a rotating schedule and escalation procedures.
- Open Source: A development model for software in which the source code is made freely available and can be modified and distributed by anyone, often relying on a community of developers and contributors.
- Operations: The set of activities and processes involved in managing and maintaining a system or application, including monitoring, performance tuning, deployment, and incident response.
- Outage: An unplanned interruption or disruption of service in a system or application, often resulting in service disruptions, data loss, or other negative impacts.
- PagerDuty: A cloud-based incident management platform that helps organizations manage and respond to incidents through automated alerts, on-call schedules, and collaboration tools.
- Patch Management: The process of identifying, testing, and deploying software patches or updates to address security vulnerabilities, bugs, or other issues in a system or application.
- Performance Engineering: The process of designing, testing, and optimizing a system or application for maximum performance, often involving analysis of system architecture, bottlenecks, and scalability.
- Performance Testing: The process of measuring and evaluating the performance of a system or application under different loads or conditions, often involving automated tools and testing frameworks.
- Pipeline: A set of automated processes and tools used to manage and deploy software code and other artifacts, often including version control, continuous integration, and continuous delivery.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS): A cloud computing service model in which a provider offers a platform for building, testing, and deploying software applications, often including infrastructure, tools, and runtime environments.
- Post-Incident Review: A process for evaluating and analyzing the causes and effects of an incident or outage, often involving collaboration, documentation, and recommendations for improvement.
- Problem Management: The process of identifying and resolving underlying causes of incidents or problems in a system or application, often involving root cause analysis, trend analysis, and process improvement.
- Process Automation: The use of technology to automate and streamline manual or repetitive tasks or processes, often involving tools such as scripting, workflow, and orchestration.
- Production Environment: The environment in which a system or application is deployed and used by end-users or customers, often requiring higher levels of security, performance, and reliability.
- Production Environment: The environment in which a system or application is deployed and used by end-users or customers, often requiring higher levels of security, performance, and reliability.
- Project Management: The process of planning, organizing, and managing resources to achieve specific goals or objectives, often involving project planning, scheduling, and risk management.
- Quality Assurance (QA): The process of ensuring that a system or application meets or exceeds specified quality standards, often involving testing, code review, and other quality control measures.
- Ransomware: Malware that encrypts a victim's files or data and demands payment in exchange for the decryption key, often used for extortion or financial gain.
- Ransomware: Malware that restricts access to a victim's system or files and demands a ransom to be paid to regain access.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The targeted duration of time between a disaster and the resumption of normal operations, measured in time units such as hours or days.
- Release Management: The process of planning, scheduling, coordinating, and deploying new software releases to a production environment.
- Reliability Engineering: The practice of designing and implementing systems to be reliable, maintainable, and scalable.
- Remediation: The process of resolving and fixing issues or vulnerabilities identified through incident management or other processes.
- Resilience: The ability of a system or organization to adapt to changing circumstances, maintain its functions, and recover quickly from disruptions or disasters.
- Risk Management: The process of identifying, assessing, and prioritizing risks, and developing strategies to mitigate, transfer, or accept them.
- Root Cause Analysis (RCA): A process of analyzing a problem or incident to identify the underlying root cause or causes, and developing strategies to prevent recurrence.
- Scrum: An agile project management framework for iterative and incremental development of software products.
- Security: The protection of systems, applications, and data from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction.
- Service Level Agreement (SLA): A contract between a service provider and a customer that defines the expected level of service, performance, and availability.
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): A software engineering approach to operations that emphasizes automation, monitoring, and fault tolerance.
- Software as a Service (SaaS): A software delivery model in which applications are hosted by a service provider and accessed by customers over the internet.
- Source Code: The human-readable instructions that make up a software application.
- Sprint: A time-boxed period in which a development team works on a set of user stories or backlog items.
- Stateful: A system or application that stores data about previous events or interactions.
- State Machine: A mathematical model used to describe the behavior of a system or application that can be in one of a finite number of states at any given time.
- Statelessness: A system or application that does not store any data about previous events or interactions.
- Stress Testing: A type of performance testing that evaluates how well a system or application can handle heavy loads or unexpected conditions.