incidentbyincident

Incidentbyincident is a concept and approach used in incident management that treats each incident as a discrete unit of analysis. The approach emphasizes thorough documentation, analysis, and learning for every individual incident, rather than relying solely on aggregated statistics or trend-based assessments. It is described as a way to improve traceability and accountability by focusing on the specifics of what happened, how it was detected, contained, and resolved.

The term is a neologism used in some incident response and operations discussions. It denotes an emphasis on blameless post-incident reviews for each incident, with the goal of extracting concrete, actionable lessons that can be applied to similar future events. Practitioners typically maintain an incident record for each event, including timeline, mitigations, root-cause hypotheses, and follow-up tasks. These records are stored in a centralized knowledge base to support knowledge retention and cross-team learning.

In practice, incidentbyincident workflows involve standard stages: detection and logging, triage and classification, containment and eradication, recovery, and after-action review. Each incident record is reviewed to capture root causes, contributing factors, and recommended preventive or detective controls. Metrics may include time-to-detection, time-to-containment, and the quality of the post-incident review. While it enhances granularity and accountability, critics note potential overhead and data fragmentation if not integrated with broader, system-wide risk management processes.

See also: incident management, post-incident review, blameless postmortem, ITIL, NIST incident response.