On-call incidents demand clear, confident communication. From escalating to senior teams to triggering alerts and resolving incidents, the right vocabulary makes handoffs and coordination faster. This exercise practises the collocations used in incident response, Slack war rooms, and postmortem writeups.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
The on-call engineer decided to ___ the incident to the senior engineering team at 3 AM.
Escalate the incident is the standard on-call collocation — it means formally involving a higher level of expertise or authority. 'Raise' is used in British English in other contexts; 'forward' implies routing information, not invoking a response team; 'report' is informational.
2 / 5
Before escalating, the engineer should ___ an initial assessment of the impact.
Perform an assessment is the professional collocation — it implies a structured, deliberate evaluation. 'Do' is informal; 'make an assessment' is also correct British English; 'run an assessment' is less common. 'Perform' is the most formal and preferred in incident documentation.
3 / 5
The team uses PagerDuty to ___ alerts when a service health check fails.
Trigger alerts is the standard on-call tooling collocation — alerting systems 'trigger' notifications based on thresholds. 'Fire' is also used in informal settings (fire an alert); 'send' is more generic; 'raise' is used in British engineering but less common for automated systems.
4 / 5
The SRE lead will ___ the incident channel and coordinate the response.
Own the incident channel is the modern on-call collocation — in incident management culture, 'ownership' means accountability for coordination and resolution. 'Lead' and 'manage' are also natural but 'own' is the specific term in SRE and incident response frameworks.
5 / 5
After restoring service, the engineer must ___ the incident with a root cause summary.
Resolve the incident is the correct collocation — incident management platforms use 'resolve' as the formal state transition from active to closed. 'Close' is also used but implies administrative closure; 'end' and 'finish' are informal and not standard in incident tooling vocabulary.