The Analog Outage Story Cabinet of Knots: Untangling Hidden Dependencies With String, Pins, and Paper Logs

Modern systems feel impossibly digital: clouds, containers, microservices, streaming pipelines, and dashboards everywhere. But when an outage hits and the pressure is on, some of the most powerful tools you can reach for are shockingly low-tech: a wall, some pins, string, and paper logs.

This is the story of what I like to call the “Cabinet of Knots”: the messy, tangled, analog representation of how your systems actually work, beyond architecture diagrams and clean service maps. It’s also a practical guide to turning string, pins, and paper into one of the most useful incident response tools you’ll ever build.

Why Smart Systems Break in Dumb Ways

Complex systems rarely fail in ways that match how they’re drawn on architecture slides.

Hidden dependencies lurk everywhere:

A “stateless” API that quietly relies on a single shared Redis cluster
A “best effort” logging pipeline that suddenly becomes critical for compliance
A service that only one old script in a cron job still depends on—but nobody remembers

These dependencies are often invisible until an outage drags them into the light. Monitoring might show symptoms, but the real causes usually live in the gaps between services—and between people.

That’s because most production environments are sociotechnical systems: they’re not just code and infrastructure, but also:

People and their mental models
Processes and communication paths
Tribal knowledge and forgotten decisions

Incidents often emerge from misalignments between the technical system (how things actually work) and the social system (how people think things work).

This is where analog tools shine.

The Power of Going Analog: Why String Beats Slides

Digital tools are great for keeping up-to-date architecture views, live service maps, and dependency graphs. You should absolutely use them. But they’re not the whole picture.

When you switch to physical, low-tech tools—string, pins, paper, walls—you change how people think and interact:

Tactile = Memorable
Physically placing pins, stretching string, and taping up logs engages people differently than clicking around a dashboard. They remember the map because they helped build it.
Slowness = Reflection
Drawing by hand is slower than importing from an API. That slowness forces teams to talk, question assumptions, and notice “Oh wait, does that really depend on this?”
Imprecision = Discovery
Digital diagrams often imply certainty. A wall of string happily shows doubt: question marks, scribbled notes, crossed-out lines. This ambiguity invites exploration.
Visibility = Shared Understanding
A physical map on the wall is hard to ignore. People walking by see it, question it, and contribute corrections. Over time, it becomes a living artifact of shared understanding.

Analog isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about unlocking types of thinking and collaboration your dashboards can’t reach on their own.

Building Your Cabinet of Knots: A Practical Exercise

You don’t need a massive workshop to do this. You need a room, a wall, and a cross-functional group of people.

Step 1: Pick a Story, Not a System

Don’t start with “map our entire architecture.” That’s overwhelming and too abstract. Instead, choose one outage or incident you actually lived through:

“The checkout slowdown from last November”
“The great 502 storm during the Black Friday sale”
“The data pipeline delay that broke dashboards for half a day”

The incident is your story spine. You’re not just mapping services, you’re mapping how that outage unfolded.

Step 2: Gather the Analog Ingredients

Lay these out on a table:

A big wall or whiteboard
Pins or sticky notes for services, data stores, queues, external providers
String to represent calls, dependencies, and data flows
Paper logs (or printed extracts of logs, tickets, and Slack threads)
Markers, tape, sticky notes for annotations

This is your incident response craft kit.

Step 3: Reconstruct the Timeline With Paper Logs

Start with time, not architecture.

On the wall, create a horizontal timeline of the incident:

When did symptoms appear?
When did alerts fire?
When did customers complain?
When did someone say, “I think it might be X”?
When was the actual cause found and fixed?

Tape relevant paper logs or printed Slack snippets along this line:

Log lines from key moments
Snippets from incident channels (“We think Redis is overloaded”)
Ticket updates or status page messages

This immediately reveals the human side of the system: what people saw, what they thought, what they tried, and when.

Step 4: Add the Services and Dependencies

Now, above or below the timeline, start placing pins or sticky notes for:

Services (API gateway, user service, billing service, etc.)
Datastores (Postgres clusters, Redis, S3 buckets)
External dependencies (payment provider, email service, third-party APIs)
Infrastructure components (load balancers, queues, feature flags)

Use string to connect these:

Solid line: hard dependency (service A cannot work without B)
Dotted line: soft or “best effort” dependency
Different colored string: internal vs external dependencies

Don’t worry about perfection. The point is to ask questions:

“Does the recommendation service really depend on that cache, or just sometimes?”
“Do we call that payment processor directly, or through another service?”
“Who updates that configuration, and how often?”

You’re not just drawing; you’re interrogating the architecture.

Step 5: Overlay the Story on the Map

Now, match the timeline to the map:

At each key moment in the incident, trace which parts of the map were involved
Mark where alerts fired (or didn’t) with colored stickers
Mark where someone’s mental model was wrong (“We thought this service was redundant, but it wasn’t”)
Highlight paths that were only discovered during the outage

You’re building a sociotechnical map:

The technical layers (services and dependencies)
The human layers (perceptions, assumptions, decisions)

This is your Cabinet of Knots: the actual tangle beneath your nicely drawn system diagrams.

What Hidden Dependencies You’ll Likely Find

Teams that do this exercise almost always uncover:

Single points of failure nobody recognized as critical
“Temporary” components that quietly became permanent and central
Hidden data flows: logs used as data sources, dashboards hiding brittle assumptions
Critical behavior governed by cron jobs, scripts, or feature flags that aren’t in any official diagram
Gaps between tribal knowledge (“Oh, ops knows this box”) and formal documentation

You also see where digital tools misled you:

Service maps that showed connectivity but not actual runtime behavior
Dashboards optimized for normal operation, not incident investigation
Dependency graphs that missed external or “out-of-band” processes (emails, manual runbooks, spreadsheets)

Analog mapping doesn’t replace your tools; it reveals what your tools are blind to.

From Wall to Practice: Making It Operational

Once you’ve built your wall of knots, the next step is to make it useful for real-time operations.

1. Feed It Back Into Your Digital Maps

Take photos. Translate what you learned into:

Updated service maps
More accurate runbooks
Alerting rules that align with actual dependencies
Clear ownership for previously “orphaned” components

Your digital tools now have a better ground truth.

2. Use It During Future Incidents

In a real outage, a physical map can:

Become the focal point for the incident team
Help coordinate who’s looking at which part of the system
Provide a shared reference instead of people juggling 15 browser tabs each

A physical artifact helps teams stay aligned and reduce cognitive overload.

3. Revisit and Refresh Regularly

Architectures evolve. People rotate teams. Services get deprecated.

Set a cadence to revisit your dependency map:

After major architecture changes
After significant incidents
Quarterly or biannually as a learning exercise

Each session surfaces new assumptions, decaying knowledge, and stealth dependencies. The map stays alive instead of becoming museum art.

Why This Matters: Beyond Pretty Diagrams

The real value of an analog Cabinet of Knots isn’t the final picture; it’s the conversations it forces you to have.

You:

Confront how people actually understand the system
Reveal silos (“I didn’t know your service called ours”)
Uncover contradictions between documentation and reality
Build shared mental models that pay dividends in the next incident

Mapping services and dependencies in real time—whether on a wall or in a live service map—helps teams troubleshoot faster and reduce incident impact. But the analog approach adds something deeper: it makes the invisible visible, for both the technical and human sides of your system.

Conclusion: Start Small, Tie Some Knots

You don’t need a big budget or a new SaaS product to understand your hidden dependencies. You need:

A story (an incident to explore)
A space (a wall or whiteboard)
Simple tools (string, pins, paper logs)
The right people in the room

From there, let the knots emerge.

Your clean diagrams will always matter. But the next time an outage hits and everyone is scrambling to figure out “What actually depends on what?”, you’ll be glad you once stood in front of a wall of string and learned how your system really holds together.

Sometimes, the best way to debug the future is to step away from the screen, pick up a pin, and start tracing the threads.