R*R Strategy for Incident Avoidance Loop

If you're not making mistakes, then you're not doing anything. I'm positive that a doer makes mistakes.- John Wooden

Before diving into the R*R Strategy, let’s commit to the core values that guide us in handling any incident:

Transparency and Trust:

• Create an environment where team members feel safe to speak up, ask questions, and report mistakes to everyone
• Encourage a culture of trust and respect, where diverse inputs are valued.

Blameless Culture:

• Focus on understanding and learning from incidents in RCA without assigning blame to any individual or group.
• Encourage open and honest reporting of issues without fear of punishment.
• Ensure accountability mechanisms are fair and constructive.

Celebrating Success as well as Learnings:

• Celebrate successful incident resolutions and the lessons learned from them.
• Any Incident aftermaths and postmortem should end with a positive reinforcement to encourage desired behaviours of continuous improvement

Now Lets understand this Incident Avoidance Loop in detail below:-

Recognise:

• ?? Respond: Take immediate action to identify, isolate problem to mitigate and minimise the impact of the incident.
• ?? Rollback: Always look for recent changes and revert changes to a previous stable state if necessary.
• ?? Restore: Ensure systems and services are returned to their normal operational state before closing incident.

Review:

• ???♂? Refine: Continuously improve observability metrics based on learnings/findings from incidents to improve MTTD.
• ?? Root Cause Analysis: Collaborate as a team and Investigate the underlying causes of the incident to prevent recurrence.
• ?? Record: Document the incidents and all steps for resolution and future reference.

Resolve:

• ?? Retry: Reattempt , simulate various incidents as a downtime drill, which ensures the issues are completely resolved.
• ?? Re-Assess: Evaluate the incident corrective actions and the effectiveness of the response and resolution.
• ?? Reinforce: Implement measures such as process improvements, documentation run-books and training to prevent future incidents.

This structured approach ensures a comprehensive method for managing and avoiding incidents, enhancing the resilience and reliability of your systems.

References:-

https://hbr.org/2023/05/how-to-build-a-blameless-work-culture

https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/

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