The Analog Reliability Pinball Parlor

Picture your incident response process as an old-school pinball machine.

The ball is your incident: chaotic, fast, and unpredictable.

The bumpers are your safeguards, alerts, runbooks, and decision points—each one changing the ball’s trajectory.

The tilt sensor is your guardrail against abuse and runaway behavior.

And the replays? Those are your post-incident learnings, the reward for playing the game well and designing for reliability.

This is the Analog Reliability Pinball Parlor: a metaphor and a practice for designing “bumper-to-bumper” paper drills that map chaotic incidents from first trigger to full resolution—safely, creatively, and without touching production.

In a world obsessed with tools and dashboards, this approach is intentionally low-tech. It borrows from pinball innovation, chaos engineering, and reliability design to help teams anticipate failures instead of merely reacting to them.

Why Pinball Is a Surprisingly Good Reliability Teacher

Classic pinball machines were some of the earliest complex interactive systems. They had to deal with misuse, unexpected physical behavior, and players trying to game the system.

Some of the best ideas in pinball translate directly to incident response:

1. Tilt sensors: Detect misuse early

Pinball machines introduced tilt sensors to prevent players from physically slamming or lifting the machine to influence the ball. If you pushed too hard, the game locked you out.

In reliability terms, this is about:

• Early detection of unsafe behavior (e.g., runaway scripts, repeated failed deploys)
• Guardrails that halt dangerous actions before they cause cascading failures
• Clear feedback: you know exactly when you’ve “tilted” the system

Good incident processes have the equivalent of tilt sensors:

• Rate limits on risky operations
• Automated rollbacks after repeated failures
• Access controls and approval flows for destructive commands

2. Replays: Reward resilient operation

Pinball’s free-game replays were a form of feedback loop. Play well enough and you get rewarded—not just with points, but with another chance to play.

In modern reliability:

• A well-run incident should generate learning and improvement, not just a resolution
• Teams should be rewarded for good process, not just heroics
• Post-incident reviews are the replay: you analyze, learn, and try again with better bumpers

3. Physical bumpers: Design the path, not just the reaction

Pinball isn’t just chaos; it’s guided chaos. Bumpers, ramps, and targets shape the ball’s path.

Likewise, chaotic incidents shouldn’t be treated as random disasters. You can design:

• Clear decision points (who decides what, and when)
• Safeguards (what stops the blast radius from expanding)
• Feedback loops (what information comes back to responders and systems)

This is where bumper-to-bumper paper drills come in.

What Are “Bumper-to-Bumper” Paper Drills?

A bumper-to-bumper paper drill is a fully mapped incident scenario—from the very first symptom to final resolution and follow-up—designed and rehearsed on paper.

Think of it as drawing your incident as a pinball table:

• The ball: the initial incident trigger (e.g., a partial outage, bad deploy, data corruption)
• The bumpers: alerts, runbooks, on-call handoffs, decision checkpoints, automation
• The flippers: the actions your responders can take to keep the incident in control
• The tilt sensor: what stops the team or system from making things worse
• The replay: what you learn and change afterward

All of this is explored without touching production—just whiteboards, sticky notes, index cards, and structured conversation.

Why Paper-Based Drills Still Matter in a Digital World

Digital chaos tools are powerful, but they’re not where you should start.

Paper drills offer several advantages:

• Zero risk to production: You can explore truly catastrophic or unrealistic scenarios safely.
• Low cost, high imagination: No need to wire up complex tooling to think through a failure.
• Inclusive collaboration: Everyone can participate—SREs, developers, product, support, even leadership.
• Focus on thinking, not tooling: You separate human reasoning and process design from implementation.

Before you run a chaos experiment in staging or production, you can first run it on paper—and often discover missing safeguards, unclear responsibilities, or blind spots that tools alone won’t reveal.

Designing Your Analog Reliability Pinball Table

Here’s a step-by-step approach to designing your own analog pinball-style drill.

Step 1: Define the incident trigger (the ball launch)

Choose a realistic but challenging failure scenario, for example:

• A slow, partial outage in one region
• A deployment that silently corrupts data
• A critical dependency (payments, auth, DNS) intermittently failing
• Sudden traffic spike that overwhelms a shared resource

Write the trigger as a clear starting event: what’s happening, what users experience, and what (if anything) your monitoring initially shows.

Step 2: Map the first bumpers: detection and alerting

Ask:

• How is this incident first noticed? Monitoring? Customer support? Social media?
• Who is paged or notified first?
• What’s the first dashboard or runbook that person looks at?

On paper, draw these as boxes or “bumpers” and connect them with arrows.

Step 3: Add decision points and flippers

For each stage, identify what responders can do:

• What decisions need to be made? (Escalate? Roll back? Page another team?)
• What actions are available at this point? (Feature flag off, traffic shift, rate limiting, failover)
• What information do they have—or not have—when deciding?

Represent each decision as a node with branches:

• If we do X, what happens next?
• If we delay or choose Y instead, what’s the consequence?

This is your flipper logic: how you keep the ball in play instead of draining immediately.

Step 4: Identify tilt conditions and safeguards

Now, ask explicitly: What would be the equivalent of tilting the machine?

Examples:

• Running a destructive script without confirmation
• Rolling back blindly without understanding the blast radius
• Repeatedly restarting a critical service, cascading failures
• Deploying during an incident without proper review

Then design safeguards:

• Approval steps for destructive actions
• Automated checks before deployment or rollback
• Clear “stop, escalate, reassess” rules when uncertainty is high

Draw these as tilt bumpers: if a condition is met, the game locks down certain moves and forces a different path (e.g., call the incident commander, pause deploys).

Step 5: Add feedback loops and observability upgrades

Good pinball tables give you constant feedback: scores, lights, sounds.

Ask:

• At each stage, what signals do we get back from the system?
• Do we know whether an action helped, hurt, or did nothing?
• What telemetry is missing that would make a better decision possible?

Mark these gaps. These become concrete reliability improvements after the drill:

• New dashboards or metrics
• Better alert routing or grouping
• Improved logging around critical paths

Step 6: Play through multiple paths

Run the drill as a group:

• Have a facilitator narrate the incident:
  • “It’s 02:15. Latency is spiking in EU. The first alert fires to the payments on-call. What happens?”
• Let the team choose actions at each decision point
• Follow the consequences along your paper map

Then, rewind and replay:

• Try alternate decisions (“What if we had rolled back instead?”)
• See which paths lead to faster, safer resolution
• Note where decisions felt like guesswork rather than informed choices

You’ll quickly see where the pinball table is unfair, confusing, or missing bumpers.

Connecting to Chaos Engineering (Without Breaking Anything Yet)

Chaos engineering is about intentionally introducing failures to uncover weaknesses.

Your Analog Pinball Parlor is a precursor to live chaos experiments:

1. Design the experiment on paper first

   • Define the failure mode
   • Map the expected detection, response, and recovery
   • Identify what “good” looks like (time to detect, time to mitigate, impact bounds)

2. Validate your expectations with the team

   • Do people agree on who owns which decision?
   • Do they know what tools they’d use?
   • Are they confident that safeguards would actually work?

3. Only then run a limited chaos test in staging or production

   • Compare reality to your paper model
   • Update the pinball map with what really happened

The combination of structured, low-tech thinking and measured, high-tech experimentation is powerful. It moves your organization from:

“We’ll handle it when it happens”
to
“We’ve already walked this path, designed our bumpers, and know where we’re still vulnerable.”

Making Reliability Design Principles Explicit

To get the most out of your Analog Reliability Pinball Parlor, deliberately weave reliability principles into each drill:

• Fail-safe defaults: Prefer designs where the safest or least harmful behavior happens automatically.
• Bulkheads and blast radius limits: Model how failures are contained—or not—and add bumpers to prevent spread.
• Graceful degradation: Plan for partial service instead of all-or-nothing outages.
• Human factors: Acknowledge cognitive load, fatigue, unclear ownership, and communication breakdowns as real failure modes.
• Continuous learning: Treat every drill as a replay that must change the table—new bumpers, better tilt logic, clearer ramps.

Over time, your paper drills become a living catalog of system behavior, design options, and organizational learning.

Conclusion: Build Your Own Pinball Parlor

You don’t need a new tool to start improving your incident response and chaos practice. You need time, paper, and a willingness to think like a pinball designer.

• Map your incidents from bumper to bumper
• Add tilt sensors that prevent catastrophic misuse
• Design replays so every incident and drill leads to concrete improvement
• Use analog drills to prototype chaos experiments before touching production

In doing so, you turn chaotic incidents from terrifying black swans into well-understood pinball tables—still noisy and unpredictable, but navigable, learnable, and ultimately winnable.

Set up your Analog Reliability Pinball Parlor, gather your team around the table, and start launching some paper balls. The next time a real incident hits, you’ll be glad you practiced the game before inserting the coin.