Incident Correlation
Which components correlate with production failures? A sensor of operational risk concentration, measured from observability events.
Incident correlation maps production incidents to the components they involve. Components that appear disproportionately often in incident reports are risk concentrations — places where the system is most likely to fail.
Sensor properties
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Oracle strength | Medium — correlation, not causation |
| Independence | High — incident data is external to the code |
| Scope | Service-level |
| Feedback latency | Weeks |
| Actionability | Exploratory — shows the correlation pattern |
| Type | Retrospective |
What it cannot detect
Incident correlation can’t tell you why a component fails — only that it does. Also depends on incident reporting quality: unreported incidents produce no signal.