5 exercises on the vocabulary of observability and incident response — from a firing alert to paging on-call and running the dashboards.
Key verb–noun pairs in this set
an alert fires / you trigger it — not “throw”
page the on-call — urgent notification (PagerDuty)
raise / declare an incident — open coordinated response
set a threshold & scrape metrics
silence / mute an alert during maintenance
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
A monitoring rule is configured so that when error rate exceeds a limit, the system automatically notifies the team. Which verb collocates naturally with "alert" here?
An alert fires — this is the standard verb in monitoring. You say the alert fired, fire an alert, or a firing alert. Tools like Prometheus Alertmanager literally have a “firing” state. Collocations: the alert fired at 3am, a noisy alert that keeps firing, tune the alert so it stops firing.
throw collocates with exceptions in code (throw an exception), not alerts.
launch and shoot are not used with alerts.
Related verbs: trigger an alert (also correct), raise an alert, silence / mute an alert, acknowledge (ack) an alert.
2 / 5
It’s 2am and a service is down. The alert needs to wake up whoever is responsible right now. Which phrase describes notifying the on-call engineer?
To page someone means to send an urgent, attention-demanding notification — the term comes from old pager devices and survives in tools like PagerDuty. You page the on-call, get paged at 2am, the alert paged me. The person responsible is the on-call engineer (“on-call” as a noun: who’s on-call this week?).
ring and buzz are not the professional terms.
flag means mark for attention, not urgently notify a person.
Related: an on-call rotation, escalate to the next tier, page someone in.
3 / 5
After several alerts fire and the service is clearly impacted, the team formally opens a coordinated response. Which collocation is correct?
You raise an incident (British/common) or open / declare an incident (also standard) to formally start a coordinated response. Collocations: raise a SEV-1 incident, declare an incident, open an incident bridge, the incident commander, resolve / close the incident, a post-incident review (PIR) or post-mortem.
build, spin, and throw do not collocate with “incident”.
Sequence of vocabulary in an outage: an alert fires → it pages the on-call → they raise an incident → they mitigate → they resolve it → they run a post-mortem.
4 / 5
A new alerting rule needs a value above which it will fire. Complete: "We need to ___ a sensible ___ so we don’t get paged for normal spikes."
You set a threshold — the value a metric must cross before an alert fires. This is the canonical pairing in monitoring. Collocations: set a threshold, a CPU threshold of 80%, cross / breach the threshold, tune the threshold to reduce noise, a warning vs critical threshold.
“put a limit”, “place a boundary”, and “fix a ceiling” are not the monitoring idiom, even though “limit” appears elsewhere (rate limit).
Related concepts: an SLO (service level objective), an error budget, and alert fatigue when thresholds are too sensitive and alerts fire constantly.
5 / 5
A known maintenance is happening and the team doesn’t want pages. They also need to ingest metrics and visualise them. Which sentence uses the natural monitoring collocations?
The natural phrases are: silence (or mute) an alert during planned maintenance so it doesn’t page; scrape metrics — the pull-based collection Prometheus performs from instrumented endpoints; and watch the dashboards — the Grafana/visualisation panels.
Option A misuses provisioning and drift vocabulary.
Option C mixes paging, thresholds and teardown nonsensically.
Option D pairs verbs with the wrong nouns entirely.
Core monitoring set: fire / trigger an alert, page the on-call, raise an incident, set a threshold, scrape metrics, build a dashboard, silence an alert.