# Engineering Glossary

> The systems and practices engineering uses to diagnose and fix customer-facing issues.

Canonical: https://www.decimal.app/glossary/engineering · Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

## Questions

- [Should support teams have access to production logs?](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/engineering/should-support-have-access-to-production-logs)
- [How do you connect support tickets to incidents?](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/engineering/how-to-link-support-tickets-to-incidents)
- [How do you find the root cause of a customer-reported bug?](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/engineering/how-to-find-the-root-cause-of-a-customer-bug)

## Terms

- [Distributed Tracing](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/distributed-tracing): Following one request across every service it touches, with timing for each hop.
- [Feature Flag](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/feature-flag): A switch that turns code paths on or off per customer without a deploy.
- [Hotfix](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/hotfix): An urgent fix shipped outside the normal release cycle.
- [Incident](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/incident): An unplanned disruption or degradation of a service that needs an urgent response.
- [Just-in-Time Access (JIT)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/just-in-time-access): Temporary, scoped access to production systems, granted only when an investigation needs it.
- [Logs](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/logs): Timestamped records of events a system emits as it runs.
- [Observability](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/observability): How well you can understand a system's internal state from the data it emits.
- [On-Call](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/on-call): The rotation of engineers responsible for responding to urgent issues.
- [Postmortem](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/postmortem): A blameless review of what went wrong and how to prevent it recurring.
- [Regression](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/regression): A bug where something that used to work stops working after a change.
- [Root Cause Analysis (RCA)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/root-cause-analysis): Finding the underlying reason a problem happened, not just its symptoms.
- [Service Level Objective (SLO)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/slo): An internal reliability target, like 99.9% of requests succeeding.
- [Uptime](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/uptime): The share of time a service is available and working, usually shown as a percentage.
- [X-Request-ID](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/x-request-id): An HTTP header carrying a unique ID for one request, so it can be found in logs later.
- [YAML Configuration](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/yaml-configuration): Human-readable config files that define how software and infrastructure behave.

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