{
  "schema": "vedokrok.public-item.v1",
  "release_id": "MHC-RPUB-20260920-75ad787a",
  "url": "/knowledge/mitigate-first-when-the-incident-is-still-hurting",
  "id": "MHC-D-RESEARCH-0300",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "title": "Mitigate first when the incident is still hurting",
  "summary": "The perfect explanation is not the first service you owe an active outage.",
  "kind": "principle",
  "body": "Separate the immediate question—how to reduce impact—from the later question—why the failure happened. Choose a reversible mitigation such as rollback, traffic shift, feature disablement or workload reduction when it is safer than continuing damage. Preserve evidence and record what the mitigation changed so the later investigation still has a trail.",
  "limits": [
    "Do not use mitigation-first as permission for uncontrolled production changes or evidence destruction."
  ],
  "topics": [
    "union-diagnostic-incident-work"
  ],
  "intents": [],
  "source_ids": [
    "RS-583415F9C2751E4C"
  ],
  "evidence": [
    {
      "claim": "Google SRE's incident-response guidance recommends a mitigation-first response before deeper investigation consumes the incident.",
      "source_id": "RS-583415F9C2751E4C",
      "role": "supports",
      "note": "Mitigation should not destroy evidence, violate change controls or create a larger safety problem.",
      "locator": "Incident Response Training"
    }
  ],
  "use_when": [
    "A live incident is causing material harm while a deeper diagnosis could take much longer."
  ],
  "avoid_when": [
    "Do not use mitigation-first as permission for uncontrolled production changes or evidence destruction."
  ],
  "example": "Route new work away from a failing integration before tracing every condition that caused the backlog.",
  "check": "User or system impact is measurably reduced, or the proposed mitigation is rejected for an explicit safety reason.",
  "sources": [
    {
      "id": "RS-583415F9C2751E4C",
      "title": "Incident Response",
      "url": "https://sre.google/workbook/incident-response/"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "from": "MHC-D-RESEARCH-0300",
      "to": "MHC-D-RESEARCH-0307",
      "type": "use_before",
      "url": "/knowledge/mine-postmortems-for-repeated-failure-patterns"
    }
  ],
  "collections": [
    {
      "id": "RC-6F9B0E6D320D1467",
      "title": "Find the fault without making the incident harder to understand",
      "url": "/collections/find-the-fault-without-making-the-incident-harder-to-understand"
    }
  ]
}