The Analog Incident Pantry: Stocking a Shelf of Paper Rituals Before Your Next Reliability Famine

When a real production incident hits, it rarely behaves like your dashboards and tools assume it will. Networks partition, identity providers go down, laptops can’t get on VPN, and the beautiful cloud‑hosted runbooks you wrote are suddenly unreachable.

That’s when you find out whether you’ve stocked your analog incident pantry—the shelf of paper rituals, playbooks, and checklists you can reach for when everything else is on fire.

This post explores how Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) thinking, tabletop exercises, and paper-based playbooks combine into a practical, low‑tech safety net. We’ll look at what to stock, how to practice using it, and how to keep it fresh so you’re not starving when the next reliability famine arrives.

Why an “Analog Pantry” Matters in a Digital World

Most organizations over‑optimize for the happy path:

Incident tooling is SaaS-based and assumes the internet is fine.
Documentation lives in a single wiki or knowledge base behind SSO.
Alert routing depends on chat, email, and a single paging provider.

But serious incidents often break the assumptions your tools depend on. You may face:

Lost access to your wiki, ticketing system, or chat
Authentication failures that block logins to your primary platforms
Network outages that isolate key teams or services
Partial data loss or corrupted dashboards

In that chaos, teams fall back to improvisation: “Who’s running this? What do we do first? Who tells customers? Who can approve that rollback?”

SRE culture takes a different stance: you don’t invent your incident process during the incident. You design and practice it in advance. And part of that design is a deliberate fallback to paper-based guidance—the analog pantry.

The Core Ingredients of an Analog Incident Pantry

Your analog pantry isn’t just a printed copy of some wiki pages. It’s a curated, minimal set of rituals, roles, and runbooks that help your organization function under stress when everything digital is degraded.

At minimum, stock:

1. Paper Playbooks for Common Scenarios

These don’t have to be deeply technical. Focus on what to do and in what order, especially in the first 15–30 minutes.

Examples:

Major incident kickoff checklist
- Declare the incident and assign roles
- Start a timeline (whiteboard, notebook, or printed form)
- Confirm communication channels (phone bridge, SMS trees, etc.)
Loss of primary communication tool (chat or email down)
- How to switch to backup channels (phone bridge numbers, SMS provider, backup chat)
- Who triggers the switch and how it’s communicated
Authentication/SSO outage
- Which emergency accounts exist and how they’re accessed
- Who has physical copies of credentials and where they are stored
Data center or region outage
- High-level traffic failover or degradation plan
- Business-level decisions: what’s acceptable to turn off to save core flows

Each playbook should fit on 1–2 pages and be readable by someone under pressure.

2. Clearly Defined Roles and Responsibilities

Effective incident response depends more on roles than on individual heroes.

Document on paper:

Incident Commander (IC) — owns coordination, not technical decisions
Operations Lead / Tech Lead — directs technical investigation and changes
Communications Lead — manages internal and external updates
Customer / Business Liaison — coordinates with sales, support, and leadership
Scribe — maintains a timeline of events, decisions, and actions

For each role, specify:

Primary responsibilities
Escalation paths
Who can act as backup

This lets people step into a role confidently when things are chaotic.

3. Contact Trees and Escalation Maps

These are always more painful to reconstruct in the moment than you expect.

On paper, keep:

On‑call rotations and primary/secondary engineers (even if approximate)
Phone numbers and backup contact methods for each key function:
- SRE/DevOps/Infrastructure
- Core application teams
- Customer support and incident managers
- Legal and compliance
- PR/communications
- Third‑party incident response providers

Prioritize functions over names when possible, but make sure there’s at least one real-world contact per function.

4. Pre‑Approved Communication Templates

During a major incident, every minute spent wordsmithing status updates is a minute not spent fixing or triaging.

Print templates for:

Internal all‑hands incident notifications
Customer‑facing status page updates
Initial responses to high‑value customers or regulators

For each, provide a fill‑in‑the‑blank structure:

We are currently investigating an issue impacting [service/region] resulting in [symptoms] starting at [time, timezone]. Our teams are working to identify the root cause and mitigate impact. We will provide an update by [time] or sooner as new information becomes available.

Having legal, PR, and leadership review these in advance reduces friction and risk during a real event.

Tabletop Exercises: Cooking With Your Pantry Before the Famine

Having a shelf of paper rituals isn’t enough. You need to practice using them.

Tabletop exercises are structured, low‑risk simulations where people talk through how they would respond to a hypothetical incident. No production changes, no real customers—just focused rehearsal.

Who Needs to Be at the Table

For these to be realistic and useful, all key stakeholders should participate together:

Technical teams (SRE, developers, platform, security)
Business and product owners who understand customer and revenue impact
Legal and compliance for regulatory and data issues
Communications/PR for internal and external messaging
Incident response providers or external partners if you rely on them during crises

When these groups practice as a unit, you discover misaligned assumptions long before they cause real damage.

How to Run an Effective Tabletop

Borrowing from practices in The Site Reliability Workbook and industry SRE playbooks, a good tabletop typically includes:

A realistic scenario
For example: “Auth provider is down globally; customers can’t log in; dashboards are lagging; status page is still up.”
A facilitator
They present the scenario in stages (“it’s now 10 minutes in… 30 minutes in…”) and play the role of the environment.
Role assignments
Assign an IC, comms lead, scribe, etc. Use the same roles your paper playbooks describe.
Use of physical artifacts
- Hand out printed playbooks and role definitions
- Use a whiteboard or paper for the incident timeline
- Simulate tool failures: “Slack is down now. What do you do?”
A timebox and an explicit end
Run for 60–90 minutes, then stop and debrief.

The goal is not to “win” the scenario. The goal is to expose gaps in communication, unclear ownership, and broken assumptions before a real reliability famine.

Learning From Each Exercise: Restocking and Refreshing

An analog pantry goes stale if you never restock it. Every tabletop exercise is an opportunity to improve your paper rituals.

Conduct a Blameless Debrief

After each exercise, hold a short retrospective:

What slowed us down?
Which decisions felt unclear or contentious?
Where did we lack information or authority?
Which roles were missing or overloaded?
Did anyone ignore the playbooks or find them unusable?

Focus on process and system design, not individual performance.

Document and Update

Turn lessons learned into concrete updates:

Add new steps or remove irrelevant ones from checklists
Clarify role descriptions where there was overlap or confusion
Update contact lists and escalation paths
Refine communication templates based on what actually got used

Then, reprint the updated documents and redistribute them to the places they need to live: team spaces, incident rooms, binders near NOC screens.

Schedule Regular Drills

Treat tabletop exercises like fire drills:

Run them on a regular schedule (quarterly is common)
Vary the scenarios: security, data loss, third‑party failure, region outage
Occasionally simulate “worst case” loss of key tools or decision‑makers

Over time, you’ll see:

Smoother role handoffs
Faster, more confident decisions
Fewer surprises in real incidents

That’s your effectiveness: you can weather more severe outages without starving your business.

Connecting Back to SRE Principles

All of this is squarely in the spirit of SRE:

Design for failure: Assume tools, networks, and people will be unavailable at the worst possible time.
Codify processes: Turn ad-hoc behaviors into written rituals—checklists, roles, and runbooks.
Practice, then refine: Use tabletop exercises as controlled experiments to discover where your system (and organization) is brittle.
Separate planning from crisis: Do the thoughtful design work before the outage, not in the heat of the incident.

Resources like The Site Reliability Workbook provide concrete patterns for incident command, communication cadences, and post-incident learning. Your analog pantry is the physical manifestation of those ideas when the digital world is misbehaving.

Conclusion: Don’t Wait for Hunger to Learn to Cook

The question isn’t whether your organization will face a major incident. It’s whether you’ll be prepared when it comes.

A well‑stocked analog incident pantry gives you:

Clear roles and checklists when cognitive load is high
A safe fallback when tools or access fail
A shared, cross‑functional script that keeps legal, business, and technical stakeholders aligned

Paired with regular tabletop exercises and continuous improvement, it turns chaos into something closer to a drill you’ve already run.

Before your next reliability famine hits, ask yourself:

If all my usual tools disappeared, what physical guidance would my team still have?
Have we ever practiced responding together as a full, cross‑functional group?
When was the last time we updated our incident rituals based on actual experience?

If the answers make you uneasy, it’s time to start filling those shelves—with paper, process, and practice—while the lights are still on.