#incidents

Articles tagged "incidents".

12 articles

Alert Fatigue: why your team stopped reading alerts (and how to fix it)
Reliability

Alert Fatigue: why your team stopped reading alerts (and how to fix it)

When everything alerts, nothing does. Alert fatigue is how real outages slip past tired teams — and it's fixable. Here's why it happens, what it costs, and how to get back to a pager you can trust.

WatchFor Team
5 min read
Status Page Best Practices: turning your worst day into trust
Monitoring

Status Page Best Practices: turning your worst day into trust

A status page is the one place customers look when things go wrong — and most are an afterthought. Here's how to run one that deflects tickets, calms users, and quietly earns trust during an outage.

WatchFor Team
4 min read
The Blameless Postmortem: turning incidents into improvements (with a template)
Reliability

The Blameless Postmortem: turning incidents into improvements (with a template)

After an outage you can hunt for someone to blame, or hunt for what to fix. Only one makes you more reliable. Here's how to run a blameless postmortem — plus a copy-paste template.

WatchFor Team
5 min read
On-Call Best Practices: a rotation that doesn't burn people out
Reliability

On-Call Best Practices: a rotation that doesn't burn people out

Done badly, on-call wrecks sleep, morale and retention. Done well, it's a fair, calm safety net the whole team trusts. Here's how to build the second kind.

WatchFor Team
4 min read
Website Downtime: the most common causes (and how to prevent each)
Monitoring

Website Downtime: the most common causes (and how to prevent each)

Most outages aren't mysterious — they come from the same short list of causes, again and again. Here's that list, what each one looks like, and how to stop it taking your site down.

WatchFor Team
4 min read
Incident Metrics Explained: MTTR, MTTD, MTBF and friends
Reliability

Incident Metrics Explained: MTTR, MTTD, MTBF and friends

MTTR, MTTD, MTBF, MTTA — the alphabet soup of incident metrics, explained in plain English. What each measures, how to calculate it, and how to actually improve the numbers.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
502 Bad Gateway: what it means and how to fix it
Networking

502 Bad Gateway: what it means and how to fix it

A 502 Bad Gateway means the server in front of your app couldn't get a valid response from the app itself. Here's what's really happening, the usual causes, and how to fix — and prevent — it.

WatchFor Team
4 min read
Incident Response: a step-by-step playbook
Reliability

Incident Response: a step-by-step playbook

The alert just fired. Now what? A clear, repeatable incident-response process — from detection to all-clear — so the answer is never 'everyone panic'.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
503 Service Unavailable: what it means and how to fix it
Networking

503 Service Unavailable: what it means and how to fix it

A 503 means your server is alive but can't handle the request right now — usually overload or maintenance. Here's what's happening, how to fix it, and how to keep it from surprising your users.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
500 Internal Server Error: what it means and how to fix it
Networking

500 Internal Server Error: what it means and how to fix it

500 is the server's way of saying 'something went wrong and I don't know how to explain it.' Here's what causes it, how to find the real error, and how to stop it recurring.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
Incident Severity Levels (SEV1–SEV4) Explained
Reliability

Incident Severity Levels (SEV1–SEV4) Explained

Not every incident deserves the same response. Severity levels — SEV1 to SEV4 — give your team a shared language for 'how bad is this?' so the response always matches the reality.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
How to Write a Good Runbook
Reliability

How to Write a Good Runbook

A runbook turns 3am panic into a calm checklist. Here's what makes a runbook actually useful when an alert fires — and the mistakes that make them worthless.

WatchFor Team
3 min read