Introduction

Not every incident needs another dashboard.

In high-stakes environments—24/7 SaaS platforms, critical APIs, internal enterprise tools—teams often rely on digital incident dashboards and chat tools. But in the middle of a major outage, those screens can become cluttered, hidden behind windows, or simply ignored. What you really need is a single, always-visible place that answers the basic questions everyone is asking:

• What’s broken?
• Who’s on it?
• What’s happening now vs. what already happened?
• Where do I go to learn more?

That’s where the Analog Incident Story Trainboard comes in: a physical, clickable wall grid that tracks the story of an outage in real time, complements your digital tools, and keeps everyone literally on the same page.

This post walks through how to design such a wall, integrate it with your existing incident tooling, and turn it into a core part of your incident management ecosystem.

Why Analog Still Matters in a Digital Ops World

Digital dashboards are great for:

• Real-time metrics and alerts
• Joining bridge calls or chat rooms
• Paging on-call responders

But they aren’t always great for shared, persistent awareness across a broader group—especially:

• In large offices or NOCs where multiple teams share space
• During cross-functional incident response involving support, product, and leadership
• When people walk in midway through an incident and need context fast

An analog wall:

• Is always on—no need to unlock a screen or find the right tab
• Provides a single shared artifact that everyone can physically point at
• Encourages discipline and structure in how incidents are tracked
• Acts as a memory aid when attention is fragmented across tools

It’s not a replacement for your monitoring or chat tools. It’s the physical front door to your incident story.

Designing the Incident Story Trainboard

Think of the wall as a trainboard in an old railway station: each row is a “train” (incident) and the columns show key information that changes over time.

Step 1: Choose the Location

The wall must be:

• Highly visible: near your NOC, ops area, or team hub
• Accessible: easy for incident commanders and scribes to update in real time
• Unambiguous: no competing posters or notes; this wall is for incidents only

If you’re a hybrid or remote-first team, consider using two layers:

1. A physical wall in the main office
2. A mirrored digital board (e.g., Miro, FigJam, or a shared sheet) that remote participants can see during calls

Step 2: Define the Grid Structure

Use whiteboard paint, a large whiteboard, or mounted foam boards with tape. Create a grid with rows and columns. A simple starting layout:

Columns (per incident):

1. Incident ID – Unique ID that matches your ticketing/incident tool
2. Title / Short Description – Clear, non-technical phrasing
3. Severity – With color coding (e.g., red = Sev 1, orange = Sev 2)
4. Start Time – When the impact began (or was detected)
5. Current Status – E.g., Investigating / Mitigating / Monitoring / Resolved
6. Incident Commander (IC) – Name, with a magnet/photo if possible
7. Comms Owner – Person responsible for stakeholder updates
8. Impacted Services / Customers – High-level summary
9. Last Update (Time) – When the wall was last updated
10. Where to Learn More – Link/ID for:
    • Incident Slack/Teams channel
    • Confluence / wiki page
    • Ticket number

Each row is a live incident. While active, that row becomes the canonical physical reference point.

Step 3: Make It “Clickable” in Practice

You can’t literally click a wall. The solution is to make it scannable and navigable:

• Use QR codes next to each incident that link to:
  • The live incident room (Slack, Teams, Zoom, etc.)
  • The primary incident document in Confluence
• Use color-coded magnets, tags, or sticky notes:
  • Red magnet: Active major incident
  • Yellow magnet: Degraded but stable
  • Green magnet: Recently resolved
• Add icons or tags for:
  • Customer-facing impact
  • Regulatory implications
  • Security/privacy involvement

From across the room, stakeholders can see what’s happening. Up close, they can scan a QR code to jump into the digital detail.

Marrying Analog with Confluence and Documentation

The wall is for situational awareness. The long-term memory lives in a tool like Confluence.

Standardize the Documentation Flow

For every incident row on the wall, you should have a matching Confluence incident page with a consistent template, e.g.:

• Summary and impact
• Timeline of events
• Root cause and contributing factors
• Customer communication log
• Action items with owners and due dates

Create a simple rule set:

• When a new major incident is declared, the IC (or scribe) creates a Confluence page from a template.
• The page link is immediately added to the wall (URL written + QR code attached).
• During and after the incident, meeting notes, investigation findings, and post-incident review content are centralized on that page.

This ensures that the analog story and the digital record are always linked, and that the wall never becomes the only place where information lives.

24/7 Outage Communication: Roles and Processes

A wall is only as good as the process around it. To support reliable, around-the-clock communication, define:

Clear Roles

• Incident Commander (IC) – Owns the response, keeps the overview updated
• Scribe / Incident Note-Taker – Maintains the Confluence page and wall updates
• Comms Owner – Handles internal/external stakeholder updates and status pages
• Tech Leads / SMEs – Focus purely on diagnosis and remediation

Clear Rituals

For major incidents, adopt simple, repeatable practices:

• Kickoff (first 5–10 minutes)
  • Declare IC and scribe
  • Create Confluence page and incident channel
  • Add incident row to the wall
• Cadenced updates
  • E.g., every 15 minutes during active impact, every 30–60 minutes during mitigation
  • Each update includes: current hypothesis, actions underway, ETA for next update
  • Wall and Confluence get updated in lockstep
• Resolution close-out
  • Mark incident as Resolved on the wall
  • Note time-to-detect, time-to-mitigate, time-to-resolve
  • Schedule post-incident review and link it on the Confluence page

This structure makes the wall a living reflection of the process, not a decorative artifact.

Integrating with Alerting and On-Call Tools

Your analog wall should never replace your alerting and scheduling stack. Instead, it should summarize what those tools are doing.

Typical digital tools include:

• On-call scheduling and multi-channel alerts (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, VictorOps, etc.)
• Incident chat rooms (Slack, Teams)
• Monitoring and observability (Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, etc.)

Use the wall to:

• Display which on-call team is currently engaged
• Indicate escalation paths (e.g., L1, L2, platform team, vendor)
• Record alert sources that triggered the incident (e.g., synthetic checks, customer reports, internal monitoring)

You can even reserve a section of the wall for on-call status and rotations, so that ICs and managers can immediately see:

• Who is primary/secondary on-call for each critical service
• How to escalate if the first responder is overloaded

Building a Support System for Incident Commanders

Being an IC is cognitively demanding. A good wall helps, but people need support, too.

Establish a recurring Incident Guild or working group that meets regularly (e.g., bi-weekly) to:

• Review recent incidents and what was learned
• Practice incident simulations and role rotations
• Refine wall layout, templates, and communication patterns
• Share tips on handling stress and decision-making under pressure

Use this guild to:

• Train new ICs with low-risk simulations
• Collect feedback on the wall’s usability (“What information was missing?”)
• Evolve your analog system as your services and teams grow

The guild ensures that the wall is not a static design; it’s an iterative tool shaped by the people who rely on it.

The Wall as Part of a Larger Incident Management Ecosystem

The Incident Story Trainboard works best when it’s explicitly recognized as one piece of a broader ecosystem that includes:

• IT operations and NOC practices – For real-time monitoring and triage
• Major incident management – For structured response and communication
• DevOps and SRE practices – For continuous improvement, reliability, and learning

Map out how incidents flow through your ecosystem:

1. Detection
   • Monitoring tools and alerts
   • Customer support reports
2. Declaration
   • IC assigned
   • Incident ticket, chat room, and Confluence page created
   • Wall row created
3. Response
   • Work coordinated via chat/calls
   • Wall and Confluence updated regularly
4. Resolution
   • Wall updated to Resolved
   • Status pages and customer communications updated
5. Learning
   • Post-incident review documented in Confluence
   • Action items tracked in your work management system
   • Changes reflected in wall design and response processes

The goal is coherence: every tool and ritual reinforces the others.

Conclusion

A well-designed analog Incident Story Trainboard transforms a blank wall into a powerful coordination surface. It brings clarity when screens are noisy, gives everyone a shared story to follow, and anchors your digital tools in a physical reality.

By:

• Making the wall always visible and easy to understand
• Linking it directly to Confluence for deep documentation
• Embedding it in 24/7 outage communication practices
• Integrating it with your existing alerting and on-call tools
• Supporting ICs through a dedicated incident guild
• Treating it as a first-class part of your incident management ecosystem

…you create not just a new dashboard, but a new habit of shared awareness.

Analog isn’t a step back from digital; it’s the missing layer that makes your entire incident response system more human, more reliable, and more effective.