Glossary
Quorum Detection
Confirming a dependency incident only when independent observation points agree.
Definition
Quorum detection is the rule that an incident is confirmed only when a required number of independent observation points report failure within the same short correlation window - and recovery only when they agree it ended. Under a single-origin deployment the equivalent confirmation is persistence: the same point failing a fixed number of consecutive checks.
The problem
One failed probe can mean a dead vendor, a saturated network path, a DNS hiccup or a bug in the probe. Alerting on any single failure produces noise precisely when a team can least afford it.
Why it matters
An incident label is a claim. Corroboration is what lets a team act on it - page someone, fail over, open the credit conversation - without first spending thirty minutes deciding whether the alert is real.
Practical example
RELIASTRA’s shipped multi-origin rule: two or more genuinely distinct observation points must fail inside the same 60-second window to open an incident; two consecutive successes across them close it. The deployed public records run one origin, so they use the persistence rule and say so.
How RELIASTRA approaches it
The rule is a deterministic pure function of stored check results - no heuristics, no randomness - so any incident can be re-derived from the record. Two labels from one worker never count as two points; that asymmetry is the point.
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