The Analog Incident Story Railway Station Clock

Building a Wall Dial That Shows How Long Your Outages Really Last

If you walk into a classic European railway station, you’re greeted by a huge clock: bold, simple, and impossible to ignore. Now imagine that instead of showing the current time, it showed how long your last outage actually lasted—and how long the current one has been going on.

This is the idea behind an analog incident story railway station clock: a big, physical wall dial that makes your Time-To-Restore Service (TTR) visible, tangible, and slightly uncomfortable in the best possible way.

In an era of dashboards, alerting systems, and endless metrics, why would you want to go analog? Because how you display time changes how people perceive it—and perception is the missing piece in many SRE practices.

Why Time-To-Restore (TTR) Deserves Its Own Clock

In Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), a handful of metrics drive most decisions. Time-To-Restore Service (TTR) is one of the most important:

TTR = how long it takes to recover a service after an incident begins.

We celebrate low incident counts and good uptime, but in reality, every system fails. What differentiates great teams is not the absence of failure, but how quickly and reliably they can restore service.

Shorter TTR means:

• Higher practical reliability – Users remember how long they were impacted more than they remember the root cause.
• More resilient CI/CD – Fast, reliable rollback and recovery is the difference between safe rapid releases and dangerous guesswork.
• Better confidence to ship – When teams trust their recovery muscles, they’re more comfortable pushing changes.

Modern observability and alerting tools—like Prometheus, Opsgenie, and similar stacks—routinely reduce TTR by ~40% or more. Faster signal, better triage, clearer alerts: they all help. But after a while, it’s easy for TTR to become just another number lost in a dashboard.

That’s where the analog clock comes in.

Making Incidents Physically Uncomfortable (On Purpose)

Reliability metrics tend to be invisible until something explodes. You see TTR values in:

• Dashboards that few people stare at daily
• Post-incident reports that get skimmed
• Quarterly reviews that focus more on counts than experiences

Visual or physical artifacts change the game. A big wall clock that:

• Starts ticking the moment an incident is declared
• Stops when service is restored
• Stays fixed on that final duration until the next outage

…turns an abstract metric into something every passerby can feel. The ticking second hand during an active incident is a constant, quiet reminder: time is literally moving.

This is not like a punitive “wall of shame.” It’s more like a barometer of reality. It:

• Raises awareness without blame
• Keeps incident duration salient between incidents
• Helps teams internalize the real cost of outages

People respond differently to a stuck dial at 4 hours 22 minutes than they do to a number in a report. One’s a value. The other is a story.

How Perception Shapes Incident Reality

From a purely technical standpoint, an incident is just a sequence of timestamps: start, detection, escalation, mitigation, recovery.

Humans don’t experience incidents like that.

Instead, people interpret incidents through perception frameworks—we combine:

• Raw data: timestamps, logs, TTR, number of alerts
• Context: which users were affected, which team owned it, whether it happened at 3 p.m. or 3 a.m.
• Social categories: high-severity vs. low-severity, "our team’s fault" vs. “infra’s fault,” internal vs. external impact

How the duration is displayed heavily influences how it’s perceived:

• A number in a spreadsheet: just data.
• A red-highlighted cell in a dashboard: slightly alarming.
• A big analog hand frozen near the 6-hour mark in the hallway: emotionally real.

That emotional salience matters. When teams feel that an incident lasted too long, they:

• Are more motivated to improve playbooks, automation, and rollback paths.
• Prioritize incident reduction work over yet another feature.
• Push for better observability and alerting, because the pain is visible.

Designing Your “Incident Railway Clock”

You don’t need custom industrial hardware to get started. You need two things:

1. A clear mapping from incident life cycle to clock state.
2. A big, visible analog display on a wall.

1. Decide What the Clock Actually Shows

A simple, opinionated design:

• During an incident: The clock runs, showing incident duration so far.
• After recovery: The clock stops at the final duration and stays there until the next incident.
• Between incidents: The clock is a frozen reminder of the last outage length.

You can add subtle enhancements:

• A small LED or sign labeled “ACTIVE INCIDENT” that lights up when the clock is running.
• Color cues (e.g., backlight turns from green → yellow → red as duration crosses internal TTR thresholds).

The key: no clutter. This is a high-signal artifact, not another dashboard.

2. Feed It with Real Incident Data

The wall clock is just the final visualization. The intelligence comes from your incident tooling.

Most teams already have:

• Alerting/Incident tooling: Opsgenie, PagerDuty, VictorOps, etc.
• Monitoring/Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, etc.

You can typically integrate via webhooks:

• On incident start (e.g., when a ticket moves to “investigating” or a certain priority is triggered): send a signal to start the clock.
• On incident resolved: send a signal to stop the clock and persist the final duration.

You can implement the bridge as a tiny service running on a Raspberry Pi or similar device behind the clock, translating webhooks into motor commands for the hands.

3. Keep It Physically Large and Unmissable

The point of a “railway station” aesthetic is scale and visibility:

• Mount it in a hallway everyone passes.
• Use a simple, bold dial with clear markings (e.g., up to 12 or 24 hours per full rotation).
• Ensure it is readable from across the room.

You’re not building a precision instrument. You’re building a conversation starter.

Why Concise, High-Signal Timelines Matter in Incidents

In a live incident, nobody has time for dense analysis. Screens are already full of:

• Logs
• Metrics graphs
• Dependency diagrams
• Slack threads

What incident commanders and responders need is concise, high-signal representations:

• How long has this been going on?
• How does this compare to our usual TTR?
• Are we approaching a threshold where we escalate further or communicate differently?

An analog incident clock gives that at a glance, without one more tab.

Afterward, the frozen dial becomes part of the post-incident learning environment. During retrospectives, you can literally point and ask:

• Why did this one take 4 hours instead of 40 minutes?
• What was different in detection or mitigation?
• What can we automate so we never see the hand that far around again?

Seeing Patterns Over Time: From One Clock to a Wall of History

One clock shows you the last incident. A series of them or a rotating visualization can reveal patterns:

• Are we trending toward shorter TTR over months?
• Do particular services or teams correlate with longer dials?
• What’s the distribution of short vs. very long incidents?

You don’t literally need ten physical clocks, but you can:

• Use a single physical clock + printed snapshots of its position for major incidents.
• Create a monthly “incident dial” poster summarizing typical TTR visually.

Aggregated, visual timelines like this help teams prioritize:

• If 80% of incidents resolve in under 20 minutes but 20% drag past 4 hours, it suggests focusing on the rare long tail problems.
• If modern observability you recently added really did cut TTR by ~40%, the dial patterns will reflect it—and that makes the investment more legible to leadership.

Tying It Back to CI/CD and Reliability

CI/CD pipelines shine when:

• You can deploy frequently.
• You can roll back or remediate quickly when something goes wrong.

TTR is the operational side of CI/CD’s promise. Optimizing just for throughput (more deploys) without optimizing for recovery time is risky.

The analog incident clock keeps this tension visible:

• If you increase deployment frequency and your clock starts freezing at longer durations, something is off.
• If improved alerts and playbooks shorten your TTR, the dial quietly celebrates the win in public.

It becomes a feedback loop artifact for both your reliability work and your software delivery practices.

Conclusion: Make Time Visible, Not Just Measurable

Your team probably already measures Time-To-Restore. You might even have great tooling—Prometheus, Opsgenie, robust dashboards—that really have driven TTR down by 40% or more.

But numbers alone don’t change culture. Stories and perception do.

By building a simple, bold, analog “incident railway station clock” and wiring it into your incident lifecycle, you:

• Turn outage duration into something tangible and emotionally salient.
• Give incident responders a high-signal, glanceable sense of time pressure.
• Create a shared object for reflection, prioritization, and learning.

In reliability work, we obsess over the invisible: packets, latencies, traces. Sometimes the most powerful improvement is to make one crucial thing impossible to ignore.

Start with time. Put it on the wall.