Blind Operations
The team cannot tell if a deployment is healthy. No metrics, no log aggregation, no tracing. Issues are discovered when customers call support.
9 minute read
Tag: Observability
No Deployment Health Checks
After deploying, there is no automated verification that the new version is working. The team waits and watches rather than verifying.
11 minute read
No On-Call or Operational Ownership
The team builds services but doesn’t run them, eliminating the feedback loop from production problems back to the developers who can fix them.
9 minute read
The Team Ignores Alerts Because There Are Too Many
Alert volume is so high that pages fire for non-issues. Real problems are lost in the noise.
3 minute read
When Something Breaks, Nobody Knows What to Do
There are no documented response procedures. Critical knowledge lives in one person’s head. Incidents are improvised every time.
3 minute read
The Team Is Afraid to Deploy
Production deployments cause anxiety because they frequently fail. The team delays deployments, which increases batch size, which increases risk.
4 minute read
Production Issues Discovered by Customers
The team finds out about production problems from support tickets, not alerts.
3 minute read
Logs Exist but Cannot Be Searched or Correlated
Every service writes logs, but they are not aggregated or queryable. Debugging requires SSH access to individual servers.
3 minute read
No Evidence of What Was Deployed or When
The team cannot prove what version is running in production, who deployed it, or what tests it passed.
3 minute read
Deployments Are One-Way Doors
If a deployment breaks production, the only option is a forward fix under pressure. Rolling back has never been practiced or tested.
4 minute read
Runbooks and Architecture Docs Are Years Out of Date
Deployment procedures, architecture diagrams, and operational runbooks describe a system that no longer matches reality.
3 minute read
Services Reach Production with No Health Checks or Alerting
No criteria exist for what a service needs before going live. New services deploy to production with no observability in place.
3 minute read
Production Problems Are Discovered Hours or Days Late
Issues in production are not discovered until users report them. There is no automated detection or alerting.
3 minute read