Test incident response signals and thresholds

Instrument correctness incident for invalid RAG citations (SEV2) so incident commander coordinating mitigate → communicate → verify can answer: demand, errors, latency/age, saturation. Emit fields needed by time_to_declare_m, time_to_mitigate_m, customer_update_sent with bounded labels. Sample successful high-volume traces; keep errors and rollout transitions denser within policy.

Define at least one alert that would fire for INC-RAG-CIT-2201, with a for/pending window that survives deploy blips. Missing scrape or missing revision labels must not look like health. Include a trace/log example id format you will actually search.

Add a unit/integration check that metrics increment on the happy path and on the team debugs for an hour without declaring — customers keep seeing wrong policy cites branch. Store machine-readable output in CI artifacts when practical.

Cardinality discipline: tenant and revision are usually enough; raw question text is not a label. Exemplars or trace links beat screenshots alone when debugging INC-RAG-CIT-2201. Define who owns alert fatigue review. If you export to a vendor, record retention and access. Synthetic probes should use non-sensitive fixtures and still exercise POST /v1/rag/answer. Practice the query you will type at 2am once, while calm.

Document the exact PromQL or log query in the runbook stub for this service. Verify histograms have buckets around your SLO target. Add a canary synthetic check that exercises the oracle path every few minutes in staging. Confirm that PII redaction happens before export. Track build/version as a label on the golden signals. Delete noisy debug logs before they become accidental product dependencies. In this chapter the product is correctness incident for invalid RAG citations (SEV2), the human stakeholder is incident commander coordinating mitigate → communicate → verify, and the incident id you design against is INC-RAG-CIT-2201. Re-state the oracle in your notes — INC-RAG-CIT-2201: feature flag off in 8m; customer update sent; groundedness restored — and keep the invariant visible: declare early; preserve evidence; mitigation scoped; no blame in channel. Track time_to_declare_m, time_to_mitigate_m, customer_update_sent as the scoreboard. Surface under change control: POST /v1/rag/answer. If you only have forty minutes, finish the fixture for team debugs for an hour without declaring — customers keep seeing wrong policy cites before polishing UI. Promotion language stays ternary: promote, hold, or roll back based on evidence, not hope.

Set a timer for twelve minutes and attempt only the observability concerns for Incident response lab. Speak aloud what incident commander coordinating mitigate → communicate → verify would see on success versus on team debugs for an hour without declaring — customers keep seeing wrong policy cites. Write three bullet artifacts you must keep: a fixture name tied to INC-RAG-CIT-2201, a metric query for time_to_declare_m, time_to_mitigate_m, customer_update_sent, and the rollback or refuse command for POST /v1/rag/answer. Then extend the notes with one sentence on how declare early; preserve evidence; mitigation scoped; no blame in channel would be violated if you skipped this page. Close by restating the oracle in your own words without looking: INC-RAG-CIT-2201: feature flag off in 8m; customer update sent; groundedness restored.