Monitoring and Response to Runtime Incidents
The execution phase of an application in production requires adequate observability and the capacity for rapid response to failures or anomalies. This document defines the essential mechanisms for detecting, analysing and responding to security or stability problems at runtime.
🔍 Observability domains
| Domain | Description | Tool examples |
|---|---|---|
| Structured logging | Event records with context (user, request, IP, error) | ELK, Loki, Datadog Logs |
| Execution metrics | Performance and stability indicators | Prometheus, New Relic, App Insights |
| Security alerts | Automatic triggers on anomalous patterns or rule violations | SIEM, Sentry, Azure Defender |
| Distributed tracing | Tracking of calls between services, with times and errors | Jaeger, OpenTelemetry |
🚨 Examples of events that must generate alerts
- Abnormal increase in 5xx errors
- Timeout in calls to critical dependencies
- Activation of a kill switch
- Access to functionality deactivated by toggle
- Logs with unhandled exception messages
- Detection of anomalous patterns (e.g. login spikes)
🚒 Incident response
| Response type | Example |
|---|---|
| Automatic rollback | Revert the deployment if the error level or metrics exceed a threshold |
| Toggle activation | Kill switch activates containment functionality |
| Human escalation | Alert in an incident channel (e.g. Slack, PagerDuty) |
| Subsequent analysis | Generate a timeline and records for the post-mortem |
🔊 The response must not be exclusively human: it must be supported by automation and clear playbooks.
📊 Post-deployment traceability metrics
- Average latency per functionality
- Errors per endpoint / method
- No. of toggles activated at runtime
- Incidents resolved by rollback
- Users impacted by failure
These metrics must be linked to:
- Release version
- Functional and technical owner
- Activation/deactivation events of execution controls
💼 Requirements for audit and traceability
- Logs must contain:
- Release ID
- Functionality identifier
- Timestamp + context
- Configuration changes must be:
- Versioned
- Audited by an authorised profile
- Linked to a reason/documentation
✅ Monitoring checklist
- Are alerts defined for security events?
- Do all critical toggles generate events in the logging system?
- Are metrics configured per functionality?
- Is there a dashboard or runtime execution panel?
- Are thresholds defined that trigger automatic rollback?
- Is there a response playbook per incident type?
🗓️ These practices must be validated at each release and maintained throughout the lifecycle of the active version.