The Analog Incident Story Shipyard Wall: Designing a Paper Harbor Where Outages Safely Come In for Repairs

Incidents are stressful. Dashboards are flashing red, Slack is on fire, and everyone is staring at the same three charts trying to decode what went wrong. In moments like this, your team doesn’t need more tools — it needs more clarity.

One surprisingly powerful way to get that clarity? Step away from the screen and build an analog incident story shipyard wall — a physical "paper harbor" where outages arrive as ships, get repaired at dock, and safely return to sea.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to design that harbor, how to use it in real-time incident management, and how to blend it with modern monitoring tools like Datadog, Postman, New Relic, or Uptrace so your analog wall stays grounded in real data.

Why a Paper Harbor for Incidents?

Most incident management is digital: incident tickets, Slack channels, dashboards, and runbooks. These are essential, but they’re also:

• Fragmented across tools
• Hard for everyone to see at a glance
• Easy to forget once the incident is "resolved"

A paper harbor offers something different:

• Shared visibility: One wall, one story. Anyone walking by can see which incidents exist, where they are in the process, and what’s stuck.
• Slower thinking, better decisions: Writing with markers and moving cards by hand slows you down just enough to think more clearly.
• Narrative focus: Each incident is a ship with a story: where it came from, what happened, how you fixed it, and what you learned.

The metaphor is simple and intuitive:

Every incident is a ship coming into harbor for repair. It arrives damaged, moves through investigation and repair, gets validated, and sails back into production.

Step 1: Design Your Harbor — Columns and Flow

Start with a large physical surface: a whiteboard, corkboard, or a section of wall with painter’s tape. This is your harbor.

Create columns that represent the stages every incident-ship should pass through. A simple, effective flow looks like this:

1. Incoming Distress Signals
   Ships that have just been detected — alerts firing, error rates spiking, SLOs at risk.

2. Docked for Investigation
   You’re gathering telemetry, logs, traces, and context. The main question: What’s actually happening?

3. Under Repair
   You’ve formed a hypothesis and are applying changes, patches, config updates, rollbacks, or feature flags.

4. Sea Trials (Validation)
   The fix is deployed. You’re watching metrics and user impact to confirm the ship is truly seaworthy.

5. Ready to Depart
   Incident is resolved from a user impact perspective but not yet fully documented.

6. Lessons Logged & Back at Sea
   The ship’s story is complete: incident report, follow-ups, and safeguards are captured.

You can customize these stages, but resist adding too many. The power of the wall is in clarity and simplicity.

Step 2: Create the Ships — Incident Cards with Manifests

Each incident gets its own ship card — a physical artifact that moves through the harbor.

Use index cards, sticky notes, or custom-printed “ship” cards. On each ship, capture a consistent set of fields. Think of this as the ship’s manifest, grounded in your monitoring data:

• Ship Name / Incident ID: e.g., API-2025-01: Timeouts on Order Service
• First Signal: Datadog alert? Postman test failure? New Relic APM anomaly? Uptrace span error? Note the first tool that detected it.
• Impact Summary: Who is affected, and how badly? e.g., "20% of checkout requests failing in EU region".
• Key Telemetry Links: Short URLs or QR codes to:
  • Datadog dashboards or monitors
  • Postman collections / test runs
  • New Relic charts or traces
  • Uptrace traces or span views
• Owner on Call: Who’s currently captain of this ship?
• Start Time / Resolved Time: For basic duration tracking and later analysis.
• Root Cause Notes (to be filled in later): Systemic cause, not just the trigger.
• Follow-up Actions: Runbooks, tests, config changes, code fixes, or safeguards.

The ship card is where digital meets analog. You’re not duplicating all the data; you’re surfacing just enough to tell the story and guide the team.

Step 3: Apply Kanban Principles to Your Harbor

Your incident harbor is more than a pretty metaphor — it’s a Kanban system for incident resolution. Three key Kanban principles make it work.

1. Visualize Work

The wall makes all active incidents visible at once:

• Which ships are in distress?
• Which docks (stages) are crowded?
• Which incidents have been stuck too long in the same stage?

You no longer depend on someone to “summarize incident status” — you can literally see it.

2. Limit Work in Progress (WIP)

Without limits, teams thrash: 10 half-investigated incidents and no clear progress on any.

Set WIP limits for each stage, for example:

• Incoming Distress Signals: ∞ (you can’t stop alerts)
• Docked for Investigation: Max 3 ships
• Under Repair: Max 2 ships
• Sea Trials: Max 3 ships

When a column hits its limit, you must:

• Finish work and move ships forward, or
• Explicitly de-prioritize something, or
• Add more capacity (e.g., wake up another engineer or team).

This forces hard but important conversations about capacity vs. demand.

3. Expose Bottlenecks

After a few weeks, you’ll start to see patterns:

• Are ships piling up in Investigation? You might lack observability or strong runbooks.
• Are they stuck in Sea Trials? Maybe validation criteria aren’t clear, or your rollouts are too fragile.

The wall turns invisible friction in your incident process into visible bottlenecks your team can address.

Step 4: Blend Analog and Digital Seamlessly

A paper harbor doesn’t replace your tools; it orchestrates them.

For each incident-ship, pull in key data from your ecosystem:

• Datadog: Which monitors fired? What do the key metrics look like before, during, and after the incident?
• Postman: Are contract tests or synthetic monitors failing? Which API endpoints are affected?
• New Relic: Which services or transactions slowed down? Any hotspots in traces or error analytics?
• Uptrace: Which spans are error-prone? Are there particular components or dependencies failing?

Practical tips:

• Use short links or QR codes on the ship cards to jump directly from wall to dashboard.
• During standups or incident reviews, stand at the wall while someone screenshares the relevant dashboards.
• Keep a small color legend on the wall: e.g., blue stickers for Datadog-heavy incidents, green for New Relic, orange for Postman, purple for Uptrace.

The wall helps humans coordinate; the tools provide telemetry, automation, and precision.

Step 5: Run Data-Driven Incident Retrospectives at the Wall

Once a ship reaches Ready to Depart, don’t let it sail just yet. This is where the harbor becomes a learning engine.

Hold short, focused incident retrospectives in front of the wall:

1. Reconstruct the Voyage

   • When did we first detect the incident?
   • Which tools gave us the clearest signal?
   • What did we miss initially?

2. Tell the Story in Plain Language
   On the ship card, or an attached sheet, write a concise story:

   • What broke?
   • Why did it break?
   • How did we fix it?
   • What will we do differently next time?

3. Anchor Lessons in the Ship
   Add notes like:

   • "Add Datadog monitor for p95 latency on Order API"
   • "New Postman collection for checkout flows"
   • "Uptrace sampling too low for this service during peak traffic"

4. Assign Concrete Follow-Ups
   Every action item gets an owner and a due date. Write them directly on the card or on a linked task board.

Only after this do you move the ship to Lessons Logged & Back at Sea.

Over time, this section becomes your fleet history — a visual backlog of everything you’ve learned the hard way.

Step 6: Turn the Harbor into a Continuous Improvement Engine

The real magic comes from stepping back and looking at patterns across ships.

Every month or quarter, gather the team at the wall and ask:

• Where are failure modes repeating?
  • Same service? Same dependency? Same region?
• Which signals caught issues fastest?
  • Did Datadog logs beat APM metrics? Did Postman monitors detect API regressions before users did?
• Where does work stall most often?
  • Investigation, repair, or validation?
• Which safeguards actually prevented recurrence?

You can use simple visual markers:

• Red dots on ships with user-visible downtime
• Yellow dots for near-misses
• Green dots for incidents where safeguards prevented recurrence

With these patterns visible, you can adjust:

• Alerting thresholds and SLOs
• Runbooks and on-call processes
• Test coverage and synthetic monitoring
• Rollout strategies and feature flag policies

The harbor isn’t just where incidents come for repair — it’s where your entire incident management system evolves.

Conclusion: A Harbor Worth Building

A physical incident story shipyard wall might sound old-fashioned in a world of complex cloud-native stacks and AI-assisted observability. But that’s exactly why it works.

The analog harbor:

• Makes incidents tangible and visible
• Applies proven Kanban principles to your response flow
• Couples human understanding with digital telemetry
• Turns every outage into a story the whole team can see, learn from, and improve on

You don’t need to roll this out across every team at once. Start small:

• Dedicate a wall.
• Define your harbor stages.
• Print a few ship templates.
• Pick your first three incidents and dock them.

As those ships move, you’ll see not just outages being resolved, but a culture forming — one where incidents are not just emergencies to survive, but opportunities to repair, learn, and sail stronger each time.