The Analog Incident Story Observatory Carousel: Spinning a Desk-Sized Risk Wheel for On‑Call Tradeoffs

If you could shrink your entire incident response strategy into a desk-sized carousel and spin it like a risk wheel, what would it show you?

Would it land on “wake everyone up at 2 a.m.,” “silently auto‑heal,” or “log and learn later”? The reality is that on‑call and incident response are a constant balancing act between speed, safety, and sanity. We’re always trading off:

• Time to respond vs. risk of overreacting
• Automation vs. human review
• Business continuity vs. engineer burnout

Think of an Analog Incident Story Observatory Carousel as a mental model: a physical or imagined wheel where each slice represents a different kind of incident story—low‑risk nuisance alerts, high‑impact failures, uncertain weirdness, and everything in between. Every spin forces you to ask: What’s the right tradeoff for this specific slice of risk?

In this post, we’ll use that carousel metaphor to explore how to structure your on‑call practices using:

• Risk‑tailored response steps
• Hyperautomation as “connective tissue”
• No‑code/low‑code workflows
• Reliability engineering and uncertainty‑management concepts
• Collaborative tabletop exercises and simulations

1. Start with Risk: Not Every Incident Deserves the Same Response

One of the biggest mistakes in incident response is treating every alert like it’s a meteor strike. That’s a fast path to:

• Alert fatigue
• Poor prioritization
• Slow, inconsistent decision‑making

Instead, tailor incident response steps to the level of risk.

Define risk tiers

Create clear risk categories tied to business impact:

• Tier 1 – Critical: Large customer impact, regulatory exposure, data loss, safety risk
• Tier 2 – Major: Significant service degradation or downtime, financial risk
• Tier 3 – Moderate: Localized issues, degraded performance, non‑critical functionality
• Tier 4 – Minor / Informational: Nuisance alerts, known transient issues, low‑impact anomalies

For each tier, define:

• Who must be involved (on‑call only, incident commander, executive, legal, comms, etc.)
• What actions are allowed without extra approval
• Which actions require safeguards, such as:
  • Extra approvals for high‑impact changes (e.g., database failovers, bulk data operations)
  • Peer review for security responses (e.g., blocking IP ranges, revoking tokens)
  • Explicit customer‑facing communication checks

Think of each tier as a slice on your incident carousel. Spin to a scenario and ask: Given this risk level, what’s the minimum safe response that preserves both the system and the humans running it?

2. Hyperautomation: The Connective Tissue of Your Incident Wheel

Most organizations already have a zoo of tools:

• Monitoring and logging platforms
• Security scanners and SIEMs
• On‑call schedulers and paging systems
• ITSM or ticketing tools
• Runbooks, wikis, and chat platforms

The challenge isn’t a lack of signals—it’s connecting them coherently.

That’s where hyperautomation platforms come in. Treat them as the connective tissue that:

• Ingests alerts from many tools
• Enriches context (e.g., which service, which customers, which recent deploys)
• Applies rules based on risk tiers
• Orchestrates responses end‑to‑end via APIs

Examples of what a hyperautomation platform might do automatically:

• For Tier 4 / Minor events: auto‑close or suppress known‑benign alerts, log metrics, and attach them to a problem record.
• For Tier 3 / Moderate issues: auto‑page a single on‑call engineer, open a ticket with enriched context, and post in a chat channel.
• For Tier 2 / Major incidents: page the on‑call plus a secondary role, create an incident room, pull relevant dashboards, add recent change logs, and propose next‑step runbooks.
• For Tier 1 / Critical crises: trigger an escalation policy, notify leadership, create a dedicated comms channel, and pre‑load decision checklists.

You’re not trying to replace humans; you’re using automation to choreograph the routine so humans can focus on ambiguity, judgment, and tradeoffs.

3. No‑Code/Low‑Code: Let Operators Shape Their Own Carousel

Hyperautomation only works if you can adapt it quickly. If every change to a workflow requires a development sprint, your incident practices will always lag reality.

That’s why it’s crucial to favor no‑code/low‑code automation tools, especially for security, SRE, and operations teams.

Benefits:

• Short feedback loops: On‑call responders can adjust workflows right after an incident retro.
• Domain expertise at the center: The people who feel the pain design the solutions.
• Fewer bottlenecks: You don’t need to wait for a feature ticket to get prioritized.

Examples of no‑code/low‑code automation patterns:

• Drag‑and‑drop flows to define incident routing based on alert metadata.
• Visual branching logic: “If environment = prod AND customer impact = high, then require two approvals before running remediation X.”
• Simple forms to capture incident metadata and trigger downstream actions.

Think of every adjustment as re‑painting one slice of the incident carousel—evolving how your organization responds without reconstructing the whole apparatus.

4. Borrow from Reliability Engineering and Uncertainty Management

Incidents are fundamentally about dealing with uncertainty under time pressure. Reliability engineering has been studying this problem for decades.

You can apply concepts like:

Reliability allocation

Ask: Where should we invest reliability to minimize overall risk? For incident response, that might mean:

• Stronger automation and testing around critical workflows (payments, authentication, safety systems).
• More frequent rehearsals for the highest‑impact failure modes.
• Additional observability around brittle or high‑risk components.

Risk modeling

Instead of reacting to whatever breaks, proactively model:

• Failure modes (what can go wrong?)
• Likelihood (how often might it happen?)
• Consequences (what’s the cost if it does?)

Use those models to:

• Inform your risk tiers
• Decide where to apply extra approvals or guardrails
• Prioritize which scenarios to simulate in exercises

Uncertainty‑management mindset

On‑call isn’t just about technical correctness—it’s about decision‑making under incomplete information. That means training for:

• Recognizing when you don’t know enough
• Deciding when to delay action vs. when to take a reversible step quickly
• Communicating uncertainty clearly to stakeholders

The carousel metaphor helps: each incident story is a slightly different configuration of uncertainty and risk. You’re training people to navigate that landscape, not memorize one script.

5. Tabletop Exercises: Spin the Carousel Without Breaking Anything

Live incident drills can be powerful but risky and stressful. There’s a safer, more collaborative alternative: discussion‑based tabletop exercises.

In a tabletop:

• You gather stakeholders (on‑call engineers, SREs, security, product, support, maybe legal or comms).
• A facilitator presents a scenario (“A critical database cluster in your primary region is degrading…”).
• The group talks through what they would do—step by step.

Benefits:

• Low‑pressure environment to explore "what if" situations
• Shared understanding of roles and responsibilities
• Identification of gaps in runbooks, automation, or monitoring

Each tabletop run is like placing a new story on your incident carousel: “What if the spin lands on regional outage during a product launch? How does our current system behave?”

6. Customize Scenarios to Your Real Risks and Systems

Generic tabletop scripts are a start, but the real value comes from scenarios tuned to your organization:

• Your specific tech stack and architecture
• Your critical business flows (checkout, authentication, trading, claims processing, etc.)
• Your regulatory and contractual obligations
• Your customer expectations and SLAs

Design scenarios that explore:

• Known historical pain points (we’ve been bitten by this before).
• High‑consequence, low‑frequency events (we hope this never happens, but if it does, it’s huge).
• Cross‑team dependencies (security + SRE + support coordination).

For each scenario, explicitly link back to:

• The risk tier you’d assign it
• The automation that would trigger (or is missing)
• The approvals or safeguards that should be in place

This ensures your carousel doesn’t just spin randomly; it’s weighted toward the incidents that matter most.

7. Make Simulation a Habit, Not a One‑Off

A single tabletop or test is not enough. Systems, people, and threats all change.

Commit to regular simulated exercises to:

• Test and refine emergency and incident response procedures
• Validate that automation still matches reality
• Keep new team members trained and confident
• Update documentation and runbooks with what you actually do, not what you meant to do

A practical cadence:

• Monthly: Short, focused tabletop on a single scenario.
• Quarterly: Broader cross‑team exercise covering a complex incident.
• Annually: Full business continuity exercise exploring extreme but plausible failures.

With each run, update:

• Risk tiers and escalation paths
• Automation flows (via your no‑code/low‑code tools)
• Documentation and knowledge bases

Over time, you transform your incident carousel from an abstract model into a living, evolving map of how your organization handles uncertainty.

Conclusion: Turning Chaos into a Story You Can Navigate

The “Analog Incident Story Observatory Carousel” is a playful image, but the underlying idea is serious:

• Treat incidents as stories of risk and uncertainty.
• Use risk tiers to shape who acts and how aggressively.
• Let hyperautomation connect your tools and orchestrate the boring parts.
• Empower operators with no‑code/low‑code so they can evolve workflows themselves.
• Borrow reliability and risk modeling techniques to decide where to invest.
• Practice through collaborative tabletop exercises, with scenarios tuned to your systems.
• Run simulations regularly so your plans stay real, current, and battle‑tested.

When you do this, each spin of the incident wheel becomes less chaotic and more like a story you’ve seen before—one your team is prepared to navigate with clarity, confidence, and care for both the system and the people who keep it running.