Production Incident Scenario — Collocations in Context
5 exercises — read the scenario and answer questions about which collocations fit the context and why.
Scenario: At 2:47 AM, PagerDuty fired an alert. The on-call engineer spun up a war room, began triaging logs, isolated the root cause, and rolled back the deployment within 40 minutes.
Alert collocations: fire / trigger / raise an alert
Incident response: spin up a war room, triage logs
Analysis: isolate / identify the root cause
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
What does "PagerDuty fired an alert" mean in incident response?
"Fire an alert" — the natural collocation for triggering a notification.
In incident response tools like PagerDuty, OpsGenie, and VictorOps, alerts are described as being fired, triggered, or raised — never "sent" alone, never "made".
fire an alert ✅ — the most dramatic and common; implies immediacy
trigger an alert ✅ — slightly more neutral; also very common
raise an alert ✅ — more formal; common in post-mortem writing
send an alert ✅ — acceptable but less idiomatic
The verb fire comes from firing a gun — the idea of something launching instantly. In on-call culture, when PagerDuty fires, the on-call engineer must respond within minutes. Related collocations: silence an alert, acknowledge an alert, escalate an alert, resolve an alert. Always use fire/trigger/raise with alert in professional writing.
2 / 5
"Spun up a war room" — what does this collocation mean?
"Spin up a war room" — two powerful collocations in one phrase.
Spin up means to start or launch something quickly. Originally from hardware (spinning up a hard disk), it is now used broadly in tech: spin up a server, spin up a container, spin up a team.
War room is borrowed from military command centres. In incident response it means:
A dedicated Zoom/Meet/Teams call where all responders gather
A Slack channel created specifically for the incident (e.g. #incident-2024-01-15)
Physically: a conference room taken over during a major outage
Together, spin up a war room means to rapidly create this coordinated space the moment an incident is declared. Related collocations: declare an incident, open a bridge (phone bridge), page the on-call, assign an incident commander. The war room metaphor emphasises urgency and unified command.
3 / 5
"Began triaging logs" — the word "triage" comes from which domain, and what does it mean here?
"Triage" — from medicine to incident response.
Medical triage (French trier = to sort) means categorising patients by urgency so the most critical are treated first. In software incidents, triage means exactly the same: sort through the noise to find the signal.
When you triage logs, you:
Filter out expected/normal log lines
Prioritise ERROR and FATAL level entries
Look for timestamp clusters around when the incident started
Identify the first error in a chain (the root cause vs. downstream symptoms)
The collocation triage X is now standard in engineering: triage bugs, triage issues, triage alerts, triage tickets. The noun form is also used: the triage process, incident triage. Knowing this word signals professional fluency in DevOps and SRE culture.
4 / 5
"Isolated the root cause" — which phrase best explains this collocation?
"Isolate the root cause" — precision collocation from RCA methodology.
The verb isolate here means to separate and identify one specific thing from a complex system. You isolate a variable, you isolate a service, you isolate the root cause.
Root cause is a compound noun from Root Cause Analysis (RCA): the deepest, fundamental reason a failure occurred — not the symptom. Example:
Symptom: the API returned 500 errors
Immediate cause: the database queries timed out
Root cause: a missing index on a table that grew 10x overnight
Common collocations with "root cause":
identify the root cause ✅
determine the root cause ✅
isolate the root cause ✅
investigate the root cause ✅
In post-mortem culture (SRE, DevOps), isolating the root cause is the central goal — it prevents recurrence, whereas only fixing symptoms leads to repeated incidents.
5 / 5
"Rolled back the deployment" — which statement is correct?
"Roll back" — the essential incident mitigation collocation.
Roll back (verb) / rollback (noun) means to revert a system to its previous known-good state. It is one of the first mitigation options in an incident because it is fast and has a high chance of restoring service.
roll back the deployment ✅ — return to the previous container image / build artifact
roll back the database migration ✅ — reverse a schema change (risky; requires planning)
roll back the feature flag ✅ — disable a feature via a feature flag without redeploying
Related collocations: trigger a rollback, initiate a rollback, perform a rollback. The antonym is roll forward (deploy a hotfix instead of reverting). The noun: the rollback completed in 3 minutes. Important: "rolled back" does NOT delete code — the code remains in version history; you simply deploy an older version.