The Analog Incident Story Sketchbook: Drawing One‑Page Comics of Your Worst Outages

Engineering teams live through some truly wild outages.

You know the ones:

The 3 a.m. database failover that took out payments in three regions
The “harmless” config change that quietly black‑holed traffic
The monitoring alert that everyone ignored… until it wasn’t ignorable

We write about these incidents all the time—postmortems, incident reports, RCA documents—but they’re often dry, dense, and hard to remember.

There’s another way to capture them: draw them.

This post is about using an “Incident Story Sketchbook”—one‑page comics that turn your worst outages into clear, funny, and deeply memorable stories.

Why Draw Your Incidents at All?

We rarely think about incidents as stories. But every outage has a narrative arc:

Setup – The system as it’s supposed to work
Trigger – The event that starts things going wrong
Escalation – Confusion, failed hypotheses, and side effects
Resolution – The fix, rollback, or mitigation
Lesson – What we now know that we didn’t before

Postmortems try to capture this, but they often get lost in timelines, log excerpts, and screenshots.

A single‑page comic forces you to:

Focus on the story instead of every last detail
Highlight the key decisions instead of every Slack message
Show how the system behaves as a living thing, not just a diagram

And because it’s visual, it’s easier for people—especially those not deeply familiar with the system—to understand what really happened.

Visual Storytelling Makes Complex Systems Click

Modern systems are complex: microservices, queues, caches, rate limiting, circuit breakers, feature flags, and more. Postmortems that try to explain all this in text can feel like reading a small RFC.

Comics give you more expressive bandwidth:

Arrows and flows to show how data or traffic moved during the incident
Panels to show before, during, and after the outage at a glance
Side‑by‑side comparisons of “what we thought was happening” vs. “what was actually happening”
Icons and metaphors (e.g., a cache as a refrigerator, a queue as a line at the coffee shop)

Visuals support the narrative in ways text alone can’t. For example:

A panel showing a steady stream of happy users suddenly bottlenecked behind a single tiny gateway box communicates congestion more immediately than three paragraphs about saturated load balancers.
A split panel contrasting an engineer’s mental model diagram with the actual production traffic pattern illustrates why a wrong assumption led to a wrong mitigation.

Instead of saying “we misdiagnosed the source of latency,” you can show the path the team looked at first and the actual path that turned out to be the culprit.

Humor and “Autopsy Cartoons” to Defuse the Pain

Outages are emotionally charged:

People are tired and stressed
Customers may be angry
Leadership is anxious

That can make postmortems feel threatening, even when they’re supposed to be blameless.

Humor and clever visual twists turn the emotional temperature down. Think of it like a tasteful cartoon autopsy:

The service represented as a character dramatically “fainting” when a dependency times out
A feature flag drawn as a giant red switch someone flips the wrong way, then frantically flips back
An alerting dashboard portrayed as a character yelling in the void while everyone’s asleep

The point isn’t to mock people; it’s to:

Make the incident safe to talk about
Encourage people to admit confusion and uncertainty
Reinforce that we’re here to learn, not assign blame

When someone can chuckle at a panel of themselves staring at a terminal with “???” over their head, it normalizes the fact that not knowing is an expected part of incident response.

Structuring the Incident as a Story

A good one‑page incident comic uses the classic narrative structure:

Setup
Establish the normal world.
- Panel: Happy users, green dashboards, system diagram as it’s supposed to work.
Trigger
The moment things start to go wrong.
- Panel: A small config change commit, a failing dependency, a spike in traffic.
Escalation
Confusion, false leads, and compounding effects.
- Panels: Multiple engineers trying different hypotheses, unexpected side effects, a graph trending ominously.
Resolution
The turning point and eventual fix.
- Panels: The “aha” moment, the decisive change, the system gradually returning to normal.
Lesson
What we’ll do differently.
- Panel: A future engineer benefiting from a new alert, runbook, or safeguard.

Structuring your outage this way does more than make a good comic. It:

Sharpens the causal chain (what led to what)
Highlights critical decision points
Makes it easier for other teams to transfer the learning to their own systems

The story arc becomes a template your whole organization can reuse.

Why This Fits Naturally with SRE

Site Reliability Engineering is all about:

Treating operations as an engineering discipline
Handling incidents systematically and repeatably
Learning from failure instead of fearing it

Viewing outages as “software stories” is deeply aligned with this:

Stories are replayable: you can walk through them with new hires, partner teams, and leadership.
Stories are pattern‑forming: as you see more incidents, patterns emerge—recurring anti‑patterns, blind spots, and sociotechnical issues.
Stories are shareable: a one‑page comic can be dropped into a Slack channel, a wiki, or a slide deck and still make sense.

Your Incident Story Sketchbook becomes a visual library of:

Edge cases you didn’t anticipate
System interactions you misunderstood
Operational practices you refined under pressure

Over time, that library is evidence that your organization doesn’t just survive outages—it learns from them.

The Power of the One‑Page Constraint

Why insist on a single page?

Because constraints sharpen thinking.

On one page, you must choose:

The three or four most important events
The one or two key decisions that actually changed the outcome
The single clearest lesson

This discipline fights the natural urge to:

Copy the entire Slack transcript
Paste every metric and graph
List every minor contributing factor

Instead, you ask:

What would I want a future engineer to remember in 6 months?
What’s the one misunderstanding that, if corrected, would have prevented most of this?
What did we learn about how our system actually behaves in the real world?

The answers become the backbone of your page.

How to Start Your Incident Story Sketchbook

You don’t need to be an artist. Stick figures are fine. Boxes and arrows are fine. What matters is clarity, not polish.

1. Pick your format

A physical notebook kept near the incident war room
A shared template in a tool like Miro, Figma, Excalidraw, or Google Slides
A reusable PDF or whiteboard layout with 4–6 panels and a “Lesson” box

2. Define a simple template (for each page)

Title: “The Day the Cache Forgot Everything” (make it memorable)
4–6 panels for the story arc
A small legend for icons (databases, queues, services, users)
A bottom section: “What We Learned” (bullets or one big visual)

3. Draw after the postmortem, not instead of it

Run your normal incident review
Use the transcript and timeline as raw material
Ask: If this were a short comic, what would the panels be?

4. Invite the whole team

Ask everyone: “What’s one moment that must be on the page?”
Include surprises, wrong turns, and near misses
Let different people draw different panels if they like

5. Store and share

Give the sketchbook a dedicated home (repo, wiki page, or physical binder)
Reference the comics in onboarding, brown bags, and SRE reviews
When a new incident looks similar, pull out the old page and compare

Over time, flipping through the sketchbook becomes like reading the “greatest hits” of your reliability journey.

From Painful Outages to Shared Folklore

Every team already has outage folklore—stories that start with “Remember that time when…” and end with a lesson.

The Analog Incident Story Sketchbook turns that folklore into:

A conscious practice instead of an accident of memory
A visual knowledge base instead of scattered narratives
A safe, even playful way to talk about some of your most stressful moments

You still need solid incident command, blameless postmortems, good metrics, and actionable follow‑ups. But layered on top of that, one‑page comics give you:

Faster onboarding for new engineers
Better cross‑team understanding of how systems fail
A healthier emotional relationship with incidents

Your worst outages don’t have to live only in dense docs and painful memories. They can live in a sketchbook—one page at a time—where they keep teaching, long after the graphs have gone back to green.

Grab a pen. Draw your next postmortem.