Question

A financial services company running its trading platform on Google Cloud has experienced three major outages in the past quarter. During each incident, engineers spent significant time debating who caused the problem rather than restoring service, and the same root causes reappeared because fixes were never systematically tracked. The VP of Engineering asks the cloud architect to define a troubleshooting and incident-management process that reduces recurrence and improves mean time to resolution. Which approach should the architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Establish a blameless postmortem process where each significant incident produces a documented root-cause analysis with tracked, prioritized action items, and define severity-based escalation and on-call runbooks.

Answer

Assign a dedicated accountability review board that identifies the responsible engineer for each outage and requires that person to personally implement all remediation before the next release.

Answer

Increase Cloud Monitoring alert thresholds so that fewer alerts fire, reducing the number of incidents that require formal investigation and freeing engineers to focus on feature delivery.

Answer

Require all production changes to route through a weekly change-approval meeting so that leadership manually reviews and signs off on every deployment before it reaches production.