The Analog Incident Story City Map: Walking Paper Neighborhoods of Failure to Reroute Future Outages

Modern systems fail in very old-fashioned ways.

It’s rarely the spectacular zero-day exploit or the dramatic data center fire that takes you down. More often, it’s a forgotten cron job, a “temporary” server no one decommissioned, a missed library update, or a tiny, undocumented dependency deep in your stack.

These small, overlooked details quietly accumulate until one day they chain together into a major outage.

Digital observability tools and dashboards are essential—but they often give us only a zoomed-in view of symptoms. To understand how incidents really unfold across systems, teams, and processes, we sometimes need to zoom out in a very human way.

That’s where the analog incident story city map comes in.

Why Big Outages Start With Small, Boring Problems

Outages are often framed as singular events: “The database crashed” or “The API timed out.” In reality, they are stories—a sequence of small decisions, oversights, and invisible couplings.

Common triggers include:

A forgotten legacy server that still serves a critical internal API
A minor library that no one realized was shared by three critical services
A monitoring rule that was disabled “temporarily” and never re-enabled
A configuration flag changed for a test and left on in production

Any one of these is small. But when time, traffic, and business events align, they become the first domino in a chain reaction.

These chains are powered by hidden dependencies: one tool quietly relying on another, one service assuming another is always there, one team assuming “someone else” owns that part.

Without a clear map, those hidden connections only show up when something breaks.

Hidden Dependencies: The Invisible City Under Your Systems

Think of your systems as a city:

Services are buildings.
APIs and queues are roads.
Databases and caches are utilities.
People, runbooks, and on-call rotations are the emergency services.

On paper, your architecture diagram might make this city look orderly. In reality, there are:

Back alleys (unofficial integrations)
Unmarked side roads (legacy data flows no one remembers)
Abandoned buildings people still route through (old services still in production)

These hidden dependencies create cascading failures:

A small internal API goes down.
The billing system can’t reach it and starts queuing transactions.
Queues fill up and slow down other services.
Front-end timeouts explode.
Customers see the app as “down,” even though your core infrastructure is technically healthy.

Dashboards tell you where things hurt. But they don’t always show you why that specific combination of things failed in that specific way.

To see that, it helps to walk the city.

What Is an “Incident Story City Map”?

An incident story city map is a hand-drawn, narrative map of an outage:

It shows which systems were involved.
It traces how data, requests, and alerts moved (or failed to move).
It includes people, teams, decisions, and delays.
It tells the story from the first anomaly to final recovery.

It’s not just a diagram of infrastructure. It’s a storyboard of the incident, drawn like a neighborhood map.

You literally map what happened:

Which service “lived next door” to which
Which tools you walked through during debugging
Where you got stuck
Where you discovered a blind spot

This is best done on paper first.

Why Go Analog in a Digital World?

Using sticky notes and markers might feel regressive when you have APM, tracing, and dependency graphs. But low-tech mapping has major advantages:

Forces slow, deep thinking
You can’t auto-generate this map. That’s the point. Drawing it forces you to reconstruct the sequence, ask clarifying questions, and notice gaps.
Encourages collaboration
People gather around a wall or whiteboard. Ops, dev, product, and support can all point, question, and annotate without needing access to a particular tool.
Surfaces blind spots digital tools miss
- “Wait, we don’t have logs for that hop.”
- “Who actually owns this service?”
- “We never see this dependency in our tracing because it’s a batch job.”
Includes humans and processes, not just systems
Most diagrams ignore things like: “Pager alert went to the wrong rotation” or “The runbook was outdated.” The paper map lets you place those breakdowns in the same neighborhood as technical ones.
Easy to iterate and reframe
You can rearrange sticky notes, draw alternative paths, and create “what if” routes for better future responses.

How to Build an Analog Incident Story City Map

You don’t need fancy tools. You need:

A big sheet of paper or whiteboard
Sticky notes or index cards
Markers and tape
A few people who were involved in the incident

Step 1: Start With the Customer’s Street

At the top or left of the page, place the customer experience:

What did customers see? Timeouts? Wrong data? Errors?
When did they start noticing?

This is your “Main Street.” Everything else connects back to this.

Step 2: Add the First Visible Failures

Map the first systems where you saw clear symptoms:

Front-end service
Edge/API gateway
Mobile API

Draw arrows from customer to these systems. Note:

First alerts that fired
Dashboards you checked
Initial hypotheses you had

Step 3: Walk Backwards Through the Neighborhood

Now walk “down the block” one dependency at a time:

For each failing service, what did it rely on? DBs, caches, third-party APIs, internal services.
For each of those, what were they relying on?

Create cards like “User DB”, “Billing Service”, “Auth Provider” and draw arrows for data and request flows. Mark:

Where timeouts occurred
Where error rates spiked
Where you had missing or incomplete visibility

Step 4: Add the People and Process Layer

Overlay the human side:

Who was paged first? Second?
How long did it take to acknowledge and respond?
Which tools were used (Slack, ticketing, incident platform)?
Which decisions turned out to be detours (e.g., “Spent 45 min debugging the wrong service”)?

Draw these around the technical nodes. Connect them to show:

Where communication flowed well
Where it stalled or misrouted

Step 5: Mark the Hidden Alleys and Surprises

Highlight surprises in a different color:

“We didn’t know Service A depended on Service B.”
“Legacy job still writing to this database.”
“Feature flag tied to a service we thought was optional.”

These are your neighborhood blind spots—places you’ll want to revisit.

From Map to Future Reroutes: Documenting Critical Dependencies

The map is not just historical; it’s a navigation tool for the next incident.

From the map, extract:

Critical dependencies
- Which systems, if they go down, cripple customer experience?
- Which single points of failure surprised you?
Rerouting options
For each critical dependency, ask:
- Can we serve degraded but acceptable responses if this fails?
- Is there a fallback path (cached data, alternate provider, read-only mode)?
- What manual procedures could stand in temporarily?
Ownership and escalation paths
- Who owns each critical dependency?
- Do we know exactly who to call—and how—if it fails?

Codify these in:

Runbooks
Architecture docs
On-call playbooks

The next time a similar incident starts, your responders don’t have to rediscover the city. They can reroute using known side streets.

Pairing the Map With Structured Post-Mortems

A map shows the terrain. A post-mortem explains why you ended up where you did.

Use a structured post-mortem template alongside your analog map, including:

Timeline: Key events, from first signal to full recovery
Impact: Customer and business impact, by severity and duration
Technical root causes: Not just the failing component, but the chain of contributing factors
Contributing human/process factors: Miscommunications, unclear ownership, missing runbooks, or misleading metrics
What worked well: Successful reroutes, clear communications, resilient designs
Concrete action items: Specific, owner-assigned changes with deadlines

The map helps teams avoid simplistic explanations like “The database was slow.” Instead, you can see:

Why that slowness wasn’t caught earlier
Why the system had no safe degradation path
Why people looked in the wrong place first

Combined, the map and post-mortem turn each outage into a reusable learning artifact, not just a painful memory.

Turning Every Outage Into a Better City Plan

Systems are always changing. New buildings go up, old ones get repurposed, shortcuts appear. Without continuous mapping, the city in your head drifts further from the one in production.

Using analog incident story city maps after major incidents helps you:

Reveal hidden dependencies before they bite you again
Understand how small issues become big outages
Design better reroutes and fallbacks
Improve on-call playbooks and escalation paths
Turn each outage into an investment in future reliability

You don’t have to abandon your digital tools. Instead, use analog mapping as a complementary practice:

After a significant outage, gather the involved people.
Map the incident story on paper—systems, people, tools, and decisions.
Use the map to feed a structured post-mortem.
Extract critical dependencies and rerouting strategies.
Capture the finished map (photos, digital redraw) and link it in your incident documentation.

Reliability doesn’t come from eliminating failure—it comes from learning faster than your systems can surprise you.

Sometimes, the fastest way to learn is to grab a marker, walk the neighborhoods of your failure, and let the city tell you its story on paper first.