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PROFESSIONAL-CLOUD-DEVOPS-ENGINEER · Question #173

You are on-call for an infrastructure service that has a large number of dependent systems. You receive an alert indicating that the service is failing to serve most of its requests and all of its dep

The correct answer is C. Establish a communication channel where incident responders and leads can communicate with. After establishing an incident command structure, the immediate next step is to set up a dedicated communication channel to facilitate real-time collaboration among the incident response team.

Submitted by manish99· Apr 18, 2026Managing a service incident

Question

You are on-call for an infrastructure service that has a large number of dependent systems. You receive an alert indicating that the service is failing to serve most of its requests and all of its dependent systems with hundreds of thousands of users are affected. As part of your Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) incident management protocol, you declare yourself Incident Commander (IC) and pull in two experienced people from your team as Operations Lead (OL) and Communications Lead (CL). What should you do next?

Options

  • ALook for ways to mitigate user impact and deploy the mitigations to production.
  • BContact the affected service owners and update them on the status of the incident.
  • CEstablish a communication channel where incident responders and leads can communicate with
  • DStart a postmortem, add incident information, circulate the draft internally, and ask internal

How the community answered

(57 responses)
  • A
    5% (3)
  • B
    4% (2)
  • C
    79% (45)
  • D
    12% (7)

Why each option

After establishing an incident command structure, the immediate next step is to set up a dedicated communication channel to facilitate real-time collaboration among the incident response team.

ALook for ways to mitigate user impact and deploy the mitigations to production.

While mitigating user impact is a priority, it is typically the Operations Lead's responsibility to identify and deploy mitigations after initial assessment, and not the IC's immediate next step after role assignment.

BContact the affected service owners and update them on the status of the incident.

Contacting affected service owners and providing updates is the responsibility of the Communications Lead, and this action is secondary to establishing internal communication channels for the incident team.

CEstablish a communication channel where incident responders and leads can communicate withCorrect

Once the core incident roles (IC, OL, CL) are established, setting up a dedicated communication channel (e.g., chat room, war room) is crucial. This provides a centralized place for all incident responders and leads to communicate updates, share findings, coordinate actions, and make decisions efficiently, which is foundational for effective incident resolution.

DStart a postmortem, add incident information, circulate the draft internally, and ask internal

Starting a postmortem is an activity that occurs *after* the incident is resolved or significantly stabilized, not as an immediate next step during an active, high-severity incident.

Concept tested: SRE incident response process (initial steps)

Source: https://cloud.google.com/sre/docs/incidents#incident_commander

Topics

#Incident management#Incident response protocol#Communication channels#Incident Commander (IC)

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