APAC Retrospective: Learnings from a Year of Tech Outages, Restore: Repair vs Root Cause

In the fourth part of their blog series on dismantling knowledge silos, the authors explore the critical stages of the incident lifecycle, particularly focusing on the debate between prioritizing immediate service restoration versus addressing the root cause of incidents. They emphasize the importance of swift service restoration to minimize financial losses and maintain customer satisfaction, while acknowledging that identifying and fixing the underlying issues is essential for long-term stability. The text highlights the significance of having standardized and automated restoration procedures to ensure operational continuity and suggests a blended approach where temporary measures are implemented to restore services promptly while a parallel investigation into the root cause is conducted. The role of metrics like Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) is discussed, stressing the need for a precise definition of "Resolved" to accurately track and evaluate incident management performance. Ultimately, the authors advocate for a strategic balance between incident management and problem management to navigate the complexities of modern IT environments, with a forward-looking approach towards continuous improvement in incident management practices.