Platform Incident Communication: English Collocations
Clear, precise communication during platform incidents is essential for fast resolution and stakeholder trust. From declaring an incident and notifying customers to identifying the root cause and closing the incident record, each phase of the incident lifecycle has specific professional language. This exercise covers the collocations used in SRE incident runbooks, status page updates, and post-mortem documentation.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
The SRE on-call engineer was asked to immediately ___ an incident when the API error rate exceeded 10%.
Declare an incident is the standard SRE and platform operations collocation — incidents are formally 'declared' to trigger the incident response process and communicate urgency. 'Open' and 'create' refer to ticket creation; 'start' is informal. 'Declare an incident' is the specific act of invoking the incident response process, as defined in runbooks and SRE documentation.
2 / 5
The incident commander used the status page to ___ customers about the ongoing payment processing degradation.
Update customers is the natural incident communication collocation — status pages are used to 'update' customers with real-time information during an incident. 'Notify' is used for the initial alert; 'inform' implies a complete explanation; 'tell' is informal. 'Update' is the standard verb for posting ongoing status communications during an active incident.
3 / 5
The platform team decided to ___ the incident to P1 after discovering the data loss was affecting enterprise customers.
Escalate the incident is the precise incident management collocation — severity levels and stakeholder involvement are 'escalated' when new information reveals greater impact. 'Raise' is also used in British English; 'upgrade' implies a version change; 'change' is too generic. 'Escalate' is the canonical term in incident response frameworks for increasing urgency and involving higher-level stakeholders.
4 / 5
The engineering team worked to ___ the root cause of the database connection pool exhaustion within the first hour.
Identify the root cause is the standard incident investigation collocation — root causes are 'identified' through systematic analysis during and after incidents. 'Find' and 'discover' suggest accidental discovery; 'determine' is also correct but more formal. 'Identify the root cause' is the canonical phrase in post-mortem and RCA (Root Cause Analysis) documentation.
5 / 5
The incident commander issued an all-clear to ___ the incident after full service restoration was confirmed.
Close the incident is the formal incident management lifecycle collocation — incidents are officially 'closed' once service is restored and the incident record is updated. 'Resolve' describes the technical fix; 'end' and 'finish' are informal. 'Close the incident' is the specific administrative action in ITSM and SRE tooling that marks the incident as complete and triggers post-mortem scheduling.