Build Systems that Drive Business
June 11–12, 2018: Training
June 12–14, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
San Jose, CA

How to establish a high-severity incident management program

Tammy Butow (Gremlin)
9:00am–12:30pm Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Location: 230 A Level: Beginner
Secondary topics: Resilient, Performant & Secure Distributed Systems
Average rating: ****.
(4.33, 3 ratings)

What you'll learn

  • Learn how to establish a high-severity incident management program and measure its success

Description

High-severity incident management is the practice of recording, triaging, tracking, and assigning business value to problems that impact critical systems in order to enhance the customer experience by improving your infrastructure reliability and upskilling your team. The management of high-severity incidents encompasses SEV (a term used to refer to an incident, derived from the word severity) detection, diagnosis, mitigation, prevention, and closure. SEV prevention includes SEV review and SEV correlation.

Tammy Butow walks you through establishing a high-severity incident management program and measuring its success. A high-severity incident management program is an important subset of reliability engineering, focused on assuring that a team is prepared to manage incidents. This might seem complex; however, it can greatly improve your product’s customer experience and empower you to meet SLAs. This will also empower you to be better prepared for compliance and auditing events as they arise.

Outline

Establishing your SEV program

  • Common types of SEVs
  • Examples of SEVs
  • SEV levels
  • How resolution times impact SLOs/SLAs
  • The full lifecycle of a SEV
  • Measuring SEVs
  • Creating SEV levels for free and paid products
  • Naming SEVs

Measuring the success of your SEV program

  • Ensuring your team operates effectively during a SEV 0
  • Setting up IMOCs for success during SEV 0s
  • Empowering everyone in your company to record SEVs
  • SEV causes
  • Categorizing SEVs
  • Preventing SEVs from repeating
  • Using chaos engineering to empower your teams to prevent SEVs
Photo of Tammy Butow

Tammy Butow

Gremlin

Tammy Butow is a principal SRE at Gremlin, where she works on chaos engineering—the facilitation of controlled experiments to identify systemic weaknesses. Gremlin helps engineers build resilient systems using their control plane and API. Previously, Tammy led SRE teams at Dropbox responsible for the databases and storage systems used by over 500 million customers and was an IMOC (incident manager on call), where she was responsible for managing and resolving high-severity incidents across the company. She has also worked in infrastructure engineering, security engineering, and product engineering. Tammy is the cofounder of Girl Geek Academy, a global movement to teach one million women technical skills by 2025. Tammy is an Australian and enjoys riding bikes, skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing. She also loves mosh pits, crowd surfing, metal, and hardcore punk.

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Comments

Picture of Tammy Butow
Tammy Butow | PRINCIPAL SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER
06/11/2018 12:22pm PDT

Looking forward to seeing everyone at the workshop tomorrow! Please bring along a laptop. You won’t need to pre-install anything for this workshop.