Appendix C ‒ Incident classification

Tracking incidents within a classification framework is crucial because the framework provides a holistic view of failure types and issues that impact the system. If your organization tracks incidents only within a single class, such as infrastructure faults, you might miss insights and opportunities for improvement in other areas. By tracking incidents across multiple classes, you gain a better understanding of the diverse range of chaos experiments to conduct. This perspective helps identify potential blind spots and supports expansion of the engineering scope, which leads to a more resilient and fault-tolerant system.

The suggested incident classification framework is designed to help categorize incidents based on their nature and potential impact. It uses a high-level classification that groups incidents into eight main categories:

This is a nonconclusive example classification framework that you can tailor to fit your specific needs and organization. We recommend reviewing and updating the classification framework periodically as your system evolves or new types of incidents emerge.