ExceptionManagement

Exception management is the practice of detecting, diagnosing, and responding to anomalies and errors in software systems and business processes to minimize impact on availability, integrity, and performance. It encompasses the entire lifecycle from detection to remediation and learning, and it is applied across software development, IT operations, and business process management.

Exceptions can be technical faults or process deviations. They are classified as recoverable, which can be retried or degraded gracefully, and non-recoverable, which require escalation or shutdown. The objective is to restore normal operation quickly while preserving data and system state.

Core activities include monitoring and detection, triage and classification, remediation or graceful degradation, validation of recovery, and post-incident learning. Common resilience patterns include retries with backoff, circuit breakers, timeouts, idempotent operations, and isolation through bulkheads, all supported by centralized exception handling.

Governance and instrumentation support exception management: structured logging, metrics, alerting, runbooks, and postmortems. Integrating exception management with incident management frameworks and site reliability engineering practices helps standardize response, escalation, and documentation.

Key performance indicators include mean time to detect, mean time to acknowledge or resolve, error rate, and availability. Challenges include noisy logs, misclassification of errors, cascading failures, and balancing monitoring overhead with system performance.