The Analog Outage Story Garden Shed: Hanging Paper Failure Vines Before They Overgrow Production

Reliability work is full of charts, dashboards, and incident reports. Community work is full of posts, DMs, and moderation queues. Both are complex, messy, and deeply human. Yet we keep trying to explain them with rigid metaphors: pyramids, ladders, funnels, continuums.

What if we swapped those for a garden?

In this post, we’ll explore how thinking like gardeners (and occasionally conductors of an orchestra) helps us:

Understand community management as tending a diverse garden.
Use a “garden shed” of known issues—literal or digital—to hang paper failure vines before they overgrow production.
Treat alerts and incidents like fast-growing vines that require aggressive pruning.
Use intelligent alert correlation to turn noisy monitoring into meaningful signals.
Plan SRE projects like seasonal garden planning: prioritize, plant intentionally, and iterate.

Why Pyramids and Ladders Fail Us

We often talk about communities and reliability work using simple shapes:

Pyramids: top-down hierarchies of members, severity levels, priorities.
Ladders: linear progressions from newbie → power user, or minor issue → major incident.
Continuums: scales from reliable → unreliable, engaged → disengaged.

These are easy to draw but terrible at capturing reality. They imply:

There’s a single dimension of progress.
Everything flows in one direction.
Complexity can be collapsed into a line or triangle.

Real systems and communities aren’t ladders; they’re ecosystems. They’re made up of interdependent parts that:

Influence each other in non-obvious ways.
Change over time.
Need different conditions to thrive.

That’s why metaphors like gardens and orchestras serve us better.

Community as a Garden, Not a Funnel

Think of your community as a diverse garden:

Each member or sub-community is a different plant.
Each needs different light, soil, and water—different onboarding, communication styles, and levels of structure.
Some self-seed and grow without much help. Others need consistent care.
Some plants are beautiful but invasive. Some are slow-growing but foundational.

Instead of asking, “How do I move people up the funnel?” ask:

What does this member type need to thrive?
Which parts of the garden are overgrown, and which are neglected?
What should we fertilize, and what should we prune?

This framing also applies to reliability:

Services are plants.
Teams are gardeners.
Tooling is irrigation and fencing.
Policies and runbooks are your planting guides.

The Garden Shed: Where We Hang Our Paper Failure Vines

Now for the garden shed.

Imagine a wall in your team space (physical or virtual) covered with paper vines. Each leaf represents a small failure:

That flaky test that fails once a week.
That alert everyone ignores.
That manual step no one has automated yet.
That support ticket pattern that keeps reappearing.

These are analog outage stories: tiny outages, near misses, annoying rough edges that never quite become a full-blown incident—until they do.

Instead of letting them disappear into chat history or someone’s memory, you hang them in the shed:

On a shared wall.
In a kanban board.
In a dedicated “failure vines” doc.

The point is visibility. The shed becomes a living map of risk:

You see which vines are growing longest—issues that have lingered.
You notice clusters—multiple leaves around the same system, feature, or team.
You spot seasonal patterns—issues that spike around releases or events.

By making small failures tangible and trackable, you:

Catch emerging problems before they impact production.
Build a shared narrative of where your system or community is fragile.
Turn “known pain” into planned improvement, not surprise outages.

Vines: Why Alerts and Incidents Need Aggressive Pruning

In a real garden, vines can be beautiful—and destructive:

They grow fast.
They cling to everything.
Left unchecked, they overwhelm other plants.

Alerts are the same. An uncurated alert system:

Spawns new alerts for every new edge case.
Creates duplicates across tools and services.
Floods on-call engineers with noise.

This is how alert fatigue sets in. People stop reading alerts. Incidents slip through. Trust in monitoring erodes.

The gardener’s answer: prune aggressively.

Structured alert management should include:

Ownership: Every alert has a clear owner who can tune or delete it.
Purpose: Every alert answers a specific question: What action will we take if this fires?
Lifecycle: Alerts can be created, reviewed, tuned, and retired—on purpose.
Review cadence: Regular “pruning sessions” to:
- Merge duplicates.
- Remove obsolete alerts.
- Tighten thresholds.

Treat each noisy alert as a vine growing across your garden. If it doesn’t help protect something important, cut it back or remove it completely.

Turning Noise Into Signal: Correlating the Vines

Even after pruning, some vines grow together—just like incidents.

In complex systems, a single underlying issue may trigger:

Multiple alerts on different services.
Logs, metrics, and traces all shouting at once.
User reports from different regions.

This is where intelligent alert correlation matters. It’s like realizing:

These five vines on the fence are actually one plant.

Good correlation and tuning help you:

Group related alerts into a single incident.
Prioritize based on user impact, not raw alert count.
Reduce noise without losing critical visibility.

Tooling can help (AIOps, rule-based correlation, event pipelines), but mindset matters most:

Design alerts to cluster around meaningful failure modes.
Use tags, labels, and metadata to make correlation easier.
After incidents, update your correlations based on what you learned.

Over time, your monitoring moves from a chaotic wall of noise to a clear trellis where vines are guided, not left to sprawl.

SRE Project Planning as Seasonal Garden Planning

SRE backlogs often look like a wild field of “we shoulds”:

We should reduce toil.
We should fix flaky tests.
We should harden this service.
We should improve incident reviews.

You can’t do everything. Gardeners know this. They plan by season:

What will we plant now?
What can wait until next season?
What’s experimental, and what’s core?

Apply the same thinking to SRE work:

Set clear principles
Examples:
- “We prioritize work that reduces recurring incident classes.”
- “We invest in tooling that reduces manual toil by >30%.”
Scope tasks like plantings
Break big themes into small, actionable tasks:
- Upgrade a dependency → one service at a time.
- Improve incident response → one playbook, one rota, one drill.
Iterate based on what actually grows
After each “season” (quarter, release cycle):
- What shipped and worked?
- What withered due to lack of time or interest?
- Where did surprise weeds (unplanned incidents) demand attention?

Let the state of your garden—outage vines, noisy alerts, strained teams—shape your next planting, not just a wishlist.

Orchestras and Gardens: Two Metaphors, Same Lesson

If the garden metaphor helps with growth and pruning, the orchestra metaphor helps with coordination.

Each team is an instrument section.
Each service is a voice in the overall sound.
Incidents are when someone’s off-key or out of sync.
SRE practices—SLIs, SLOs, incident management—are your sheet music and tempo.

Both metaphors emphasize the same truths:

Interdependence: No part stands alone.
Context: A solo that’s beautiful in one piece is noise in another.
Practice: Reliability and community health come from repeated, intentional practice—not one-off heroics.

Using metaphors like gardens, vines, sheds, and orchestras makes these complex realities easier to talk about with non-experts:

Stakeholders can see why “just one more alert” is dangerous.
Community leaders can understand why small friction points matter.
Engineers can explain trade-offs in terms anyone can picture.

Conclusion: Start Hanging Your Vines Today

You don’t need a full framework to get started. You just need a wall—and a willingness to see small failures as early gifts, not annoyances to ignore.

Try this with your team:

Create a simple “garden shed” space—a document, board, or literal wall.
Ask everyone to add one paper vine for a recurring small failure or annoyance.
Cluster vines into themes: alerts, incidents, community friction, tooling gaps.
Pick one cluster to prune and improve this “season.”

By tending your garden of systems and communities with intention—watching the vines, pruning the overgrowth, planning your seasons—you build reliability that’s not just robust, but alive.

And the next time someone proposes a new alert, a new workflow, or a new community rule, you can ask the simplest gardener’s question:

Where does this belong in our garden—and what will we do when it starts to grow?