Code Room
On-callMediumoc-p123
Subject Postmortem judgmentLevel Mid–Senior~20 minCommon in Reliability & on-call interviewsIndustries Technology

Question

An alert fires at 3am for a non-critical degradation (something's off, but users may not be significantly affected). How do you decide whether to wake people up or wait until morning?

What a strong answer looks like

Stop the bleeding first (mitigate), then form hypotheses from real signals. Separate root cause from symptom, communicate status as you go, and close with what prevents a repeat.

Diagram & narrate the incident
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.