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Incidents

Recovery confirmation

Recovery confirmation is evidence that a service has returned to healthy behavior after a failure.

What is recovery confirmation?

Recovery confirmation describes evidence that a service has returned to healthy behavior after a failure. In reliability work, the label is useful only when it maps to a measurable check, a clear owner, and a next action when expectations break. Without that operational meaning, the phrase becomes decoration in dashboards and status updates.

Why it matters

Recovery confirmation matters because teams need a precise shared meaning for evidence that a service has returned to healthy behavior after a failure. Vague language turns incidents into arguments about words instead of fixes.

When everyone uses the same definition, alerts, status updates, and post-incident reviews stay aligned.

How it works

In practice, evidence that a service has returned to healthy behavior after a failure shows up as a concrete signal you can measure or communicate. Operators define what good looks like, watch for deviations, and record what happened when expectations break.

The useful version of recovery confirmation is operational: it changes who gets notified, what customers see, or which metric a team reviews after an incident.

Practical example

Imagine a team operating around successful checks after api.example.com recovered. When observed behavior stops matching the definition of recovery confirmation, the team treats that change as a reliability event with a clear owner and next step.

Common misconception

Recovery is the first successful ping

That reading usually collapses distinct ideas into one slogan. Keep recovery confirmation tied to observable behavior so the definition stays useful under pressure.

How Fajita handles this

Fajita confirms recovery before closing the loop. See recovery.

Related documentation

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