Dead Air on Incident Call

When troubleshooting A high impact software failure In A band, You to have has be ready For changes In tenor. A moment There is A frenzy of coordination, And THE following: absolute silence.

Silence East natural And often useful. But has be A effective incident commander – of which job East has keep THE problem solving effort moving Before – You must develop A keen ear For silence.

Silence can mean different things has different people In different situations. In This job, I will here A little incident scenarios And explore THE role of THE incident commander In breakup (Or simply respectful In) dead air.

"Any of them minute NOW"

Sylvain (Since THE [support team) has spun up A incident call After get 3 consecutive reports of broken CSS on THE production application. You are THE incident commander, And Oscar (Since [operations] has immediately volunteer has be THE primary investigator. Deanna And Deepak (software [d]evs) are Also on THE call.

There is a few ambiguity about if THE CSS issue merits A Status page job. Person has find A "smoking gun" showing that, For example, 404 Errors are event has A pupil rate. And NOW Oscar announcement, "I am seeing a few save entries Since THE the Web server that look A little weird. I am go look has those." This East THE beginning of A 5 minutes silence.

During THE silence, Deanna, Deepak, And Sylvain are all waiting for, hoping that these save entries that Oscar just REMARK turn out has be THE smoking gun. They are putting their eggs In THE basket of Oscar intuition. Hopefully he is seen This issue Before, And any of them minute NOW hell say "All right, I am push A repair."

THE issue East, It is also possible that Oscar has Locked on A red herring (a few projecting but Ultimately non pertinent observation). If there were A conversation In place of silence, SO Deanna could be research THE error message, Or Deepak could be able has immediately ruler out THE error as A cause of THE broken CSS, Or Sylvain could provide A detail Since A of THE customer tickets that would be narrow THE scope of THE investigation. But instead, everyone turn around their inches hoping For Oscar has emerge with A correct.

A incident commander East responsible For keeping THE entire problem solving effort moving Before. SO It is holder on You has interrupt This silence.

To try drawing more information out of Oscar:

"Oscar, TO DO You spirit sharing your screen SO Deepak And Deanna can see THE weird save posts Also?" "What is this THE error message, Oscar? Can You send A link has A save research?" "Do We know When these save events begin? Do that double up with When We begin receive these support tickets, Sylvain?

THE more We Audit each others thought process, THE more effective We are has joint problem solving. A THIS must TO DO This arrive.

“LGTM”

Sylvain has spun up A incident call After get 3 consecutive reports of broken CSS on THE production website. You are THE incident commander.

Oscar has checked A bunch of chart Dashboards And doesn't find any of them evidence of A widespread system failure. He is said as a lot. NOW There is relative silence on THE call For five minutes.

Deanna And Deepak are basically In agreement with Oscar: There is No evidence of A system health issue. HAS them, And has Oscar, It is not Really clear how strong A signal Sylvain has. He could just be A coincidence that these three reports all arrived In A row. THE engineers on THE call are thought, I guess GOOD keep sting has This, but were not even Of course This East A real issue. We need more information.

Sylvain, on THE other hand, East positive that something East fake. Get 3 support tickets In A row about THE even behavior East very strong evidence has him. He is present her information has THE investigators, And NOW he is thought, All right, they say It is not A widespread issue. But I am Of course Oscar East get has THE down of he.

There is has been A common ground breakdown, And as A result, A silence that becomes more And more frustrating.

As incident commander, You should to focus THE groups attention on observable symptoms by ask questions like:

"HAS anybody has been able has reproduce these broken page loads In A Navigator? Preferably with Developer Tools turned on?" “Sylvain, I don't do it to have A intuition For support ticket frequencies. How unusual East he has get 3 reports of THE even thing RIGHT In A row as This?" "Can We find, In THE to access newspapers, just A example of A style sheet request that income A non-200 answer?" " Let's go see here…"

Sylvain has spun up A incident call After get 3 consecutive reports of broken CSS on THE production website. You are THE incident commander. Th...