Incident Response Collocations: Declaring an Incident
5 collocation exercises on incident response verbs.
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1 / 5
During an outage the on-call engineer needs to ___ an incident to get more responders.
Declare an incident is the standard collocation in SRE and incident-response practice. When you declare an incident you formally open it, notify stakeholders, and trigger the response process. While open and call sound plausible, neither is the fixed industry term, and announce implies broadcasting news rather than starting a structured response. You will see declare an incident in runbooks, status pages, and tools such as PagerDuty and Incident.io, so memorising the verb-noun pairing is essential for fluent on-call communication.
2 / 5
If the first responder cannot fix the problem, they should ___ the incident to a senior engineer.
We escalate an incident when it needs more expertise, authority, or resources than the current responder can provide. Escalate carries the precise meaning of moving something up a chain of responsibility. Raise collocates with issues or tickets, not the act of involving senior staff mid-incident, and promote and upgrade belong to releases and software versions. In runbooks you will read instructions like "escalate to the secondary on-call," which is why escalate an incident is the natural, expected phrasing here.
3 / 5
The immediate goal during an outage is to ___ the impact, even before finding the root cause.
To mitigate the impact means to reduce the harm or severity of an incident, often by rolling back, failing over, or throttling traffic. Mitigate is the canonical incident-response verb because teams prioritise reducing damage before they fully diagnose the cause. Solve and cure imply a complete fix, which usually comes later, and erase does not collocate with impact at all. Phrases such as "mitigate the blast radius" appear constantly in postmortems, making mitigate the impact the precise professional choice.
4 / 5
Once the fix is in place, the team works to ___ service to all affected users.
We restore service when we bring a degraded or down system back to its normal operating state. Restore is the established collocation in SLAs, status updates, and incident timelines, often paired with the metric MTTR (mean time to restore). While recover is close, it usually describes data or systems coming back on their own, and return and refresh do not pair naturally with service. You will see "service restored" on public status pages, confirming that restore service is the correct, idiomatic phrasing.
5 / 5
Monitoring detected the failure overnight and automatically ___ the on-call engineer.
To page on-call means to send an urgent alert that summons the engineer responsible at that moment. Page survives from the era of physical pagers and remains the standard verb in tools like PagerDuty and Opsgenie. Called is too generic, and rang or buzzed are informal and never used in incident tooling. Engineers say "I got paged at 3 a.m.," so page the on-call engineer is the precise, professional collocation expected in any incident-response context.