Glossary
Incident Attribution
Determining whether an incident originated inside your stack or with a vendor.
Definition
Incident attribution is the process of assigning an observed failure to its most likely origin - your infrastructure or a specific external dependency - using correlated timelines rather than inference.
The problem
An outage you caused and an outage your vendor caused look identical from inside your own monitoring. Both present as your service failing.
Why it matters
Correct attribution decides where engineers look first, what gets rolled back, what gets escalated to a vendor, and what evidence supports an SLA claim.
Practical example
Your incident window (14:02–14:19) overlaps a period in which the dependency was independently observed failing across two regions. That overlap is a fact about two measured timelines.
How RELIASTRA approaches it
RELIASTRA keeps your incident history and the dependency’s observation history on the same timeline, applies a deterministic correlation engine with confidence levels, and refuses to claim causation - only correlated, timestamped evidence.
Know when your dependencies fail. Prove what happened.
Monitor the external APIs your product relies on, correlate their failures with your incidents, and generate verifiable evidence when a vendor causes downtime.