MENU
An on-call cloud engineer receives a critical alert about an e-commerce web server being unresponsive. Which of the following steps should the engineer take first?
In CompTIA Cloud+ (CV0-004) objectives covering operations, incident response, and troubleshooting, the first action after receiving a critical alert is triage. Triage is the rapid initial assessment that confirms the alert is real, determines the scope and impact (single host vs. entire service), identifies immediate risks (customer impact, revenue loss, security implications), and prioritizes the response. During triage, the engineer checks key indicators such as health checks, uptime monitors, recent deployments, system metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network), and logs to establish what is failing and how widespread it is. This step guides the most effective next actions and prevents wasting time on incorrect assumptions.
Remediation (B) comes after triage because you need enough facts to choose the correct fix (restart service, fail over, scale out, roll back, etc.). Escalation (C) may be required, but it is typically based on triage findings---severity, ownership, and whether additional expertise is needed. Monitoring (D) is ongoing and supports detection and validation, but it is not the first step once an incident has already been detected. Therefore, triage is the correct first step.