The Cardboard Outage Storyboard Tramline: Walking Through Incidents Frame‑By‑Frame

Post-incident reviews often feel like reading a crime report backwards: scattered logs, half-remembered Slack messages, tense timelines, and heated debate about what “really” happened. Everyone is sure they were right; nobody is sure about the sequence. The result? Slow learning, repeated mistakes, and incident fatigue.

There is a better way: treat outage analysis like forensics, and visualize it like a storyboard.

In this post, we will explore the “Cardboard Outage Storyboard Tramline”—a simple, physical way to walk through incidents frame‑by‑frame using paper scenes on a wall. It combines forensic thinking with storyboard techniques to uncover what actually happened, why it happened, and how to respond better next time.

Why Storyboard an Outage?

When an outage hits, information arrives in fragments:

• A monitoring alert fires.
• Someone notices customer complaints on social media.
• An engineer restarts a service.
• A manager posts in Slack.
• A database metric spikes, then recovers.

Later, during the incident review, these fragments are buried in tools and memories. Timelines are reconstructed from logs, messages, and tickets. But without a clear visual sequence, teams fall back on blame, oversimplified narratives, or hindsight bias.

A storyboard tramline fixes this by:

• Making time visible – everyone can see when events actually occurred.
• Breaking complexity into frames – alerts, decisions, actions, and outcomes become discrete steps.
• Aligning perspectives – cross‑functional participants literally stand in the same place and look at the same wall.
• Revealing gaps – missing data, late alerts, or communication black holes become obvious.

The aim is not to produce art. The aim is shared understanding.

Step 1: Start With a Forensic Mindset

Think like an investigator, not a judge.

Treat your incident as a case to be examined:

• Collect evidence: logs, metrics screenshots, Slack threads, change tickets, pager alerts, user reports, on‑call notes.
• Preserve sequence: note timestamps as accurately as possible (including time zones).
• Stay descriptive, not evaluative: write down what happened, not what you think should have happened.

Your goal is to reconstruct:

Who did what, when, with what information, and what happened next?

This mindset shifts the review from “Who messed up?” to “How did our system and process lead to this outcome?”—the foundation of a productive storyboard tramline.

Step 2: Build the Timeline Tramline on the Wall

Now move from tools to the wall.

1. Claim physical space: a long wall, a series of whiteboards, or taped sheets of paper.
2. Draw a vertical time axis:
   • The vertical axis = time (top is earliest, bottom is latest).
   • Mark key units: minutes during the hot phase, hours or days for longer-running incidents.
3. Create a horizontal tramline:
   • Think of it as a track where each “car” is a frame.
   • Attach rows of paper or sticky notes horizontally beside the time marks.

Why vertical time? Because it naturally leads people to walk up and down the incident, reading from earliest to latest, and it separates different strands of activity across the horizontal axis.

You now have a blank tramline—a scaffold to hang your entire incident story.

Step 3: Break the Incident into Frames

Next, break the incident into discrete, visual frames. Each frame is a small scene representing one step:

• An alert triggered
• A decision made
• An action taken
• An outcome observed

Use index cards, sticky notes, or A5 sheets. On each one, capture:

• Time (e.g., 14:32)
• Type (alert, decision, action, outcome)
• Who (team or role, not necessarily names)
• What happened (one or two clear sentences)
• Where evidence lives (log link, dashboard, Slack channel, ticket ID)

Example frames:

• 14:17 – Alert
  PagerDuty: High error rate on Checkout API in prod-eu.

• 14:20 – Decision
  On‑call (Backend) prioritizes incident as SEV‑2; no public status update yet.

• 14:26 – Action
  SRE rolls back deployment checkout-service v2024.05.12-01.

• 14:30 – Outcome
  Error rate down, latency spikes; login failures increase.

Place each frame at the correct time on the vertical axis, and within the appropriate horizontal lane (e.g., Observability, Backend, SRE, Customer Support, Comms).

Suddenly, your incident is no longer a fog of narratives. It is a film strip—scene by scene.

Step 4: Walk the Wall With a Cross‑Functional Crew

Storyboarding only works if all the characters are on set.

Invite:

• On‑call engineers (SRE, backend, frontend, data, etc.)
• Incident commanders or coordinators
• Customer support or customer success
• Product owners or managers
• Communications / status page owners

Together, walk the wall from top to bottom:

1. Narrate the story: someone reads each frame aloud.
2. Ask for additions: “What else was happening here?”
3. Layer multiple viewpoints: add new frames when someone says, “At this moment, support was already flooded with tickets,” or “We were testing a fix in staging.”
4. Mark uncertainty: if nobody is sure what happened at a given time, mark that space with a different colored note: “Unknown – need data.”

This physical walkthrough does three powerful things:

• Makes hidden work visible (support, comms, manual checks).
• Surfaces communication gaps (no one told support there was an incident for 40 minutes).
• Aligns mental models (participants see the same sequence and stop arguing over conflicting timelines).

The wall becomes a shared reference, not an argument.

Step 5: Think Like a Storyboard Artist (Not an Artist‑Artist)

You are not drawing Pixar frames. You are borrowing storyboard skills, not artistic skills.

Storyboard artists focus on:

• Sequence – what happens first, then next, then after that.
• Clarity of action – each frame clearly shows a step.
• Viewpoints – seeing the same moment from different angles.

Translate that into incident work:

• Avoid cluttered, overloaded frames. Each should tell one clear action or observation.
• Use icons or mini stick figures if helpful, but do not get stuck on drawing quality.
• Use color coding to increase clarity:
  • Red for alerts or failures
  • Blue for decisions
  • Green for actions
  • Yellow for outcomes or external impact

Optionally, add simple arrows between related frames to highlight causality: “This rollback caused that side effect,” or “This delayed response made impact worse.”

The goal remains the same: anyone walking in cold should be able to understand the incident by following the tramline.

Step 6: Use the Storyboard to Expose Gaps

Once the tramline is complete, step back and scan for patterns and holes.

Look for:

• Monitoring gaps

  • Long stretches of silent time before detection.
  • Customer complaints preceding any internal alert.
  • Critical steps with no metrics or logs attached.

• Communication gaps

  • Support discovering the incident via angry customers.
  • Engineering fixes applied without informing the incident commander.
  • Status page updates lagging far behind internal actions.

• Decision bottlenecks

  • Repeated waiting for a specific person or team.
  • Confusion over who could authorize a rollback or failover.

• Process mismatches

  • Runbooks that do not match what responders actually did.
  • Tools that responders bypass because they are too slow or unclear.

Mark these with visible annotations on the wall: circles, question marks, or “gap” sticky notes. These are not complaints; they are clues.

Step 7: Turn Insights into Concrete Follow‑Ups

A beautiful storyboard with no follow‑through is just wall art.

Convert insights into specific, owned actions. For each major gap, ask:

1. What change would have reduced impact or sped up diagnosis?
2. Who owns that change?
3. What is the smallest useful improvement we can ship soon?

Typical follow‑ups might include:

• Improved runbooks

  • Add or update steps that responders actually used.
  • Include screenshots or links directly to the dashboards you relied on.
  • Clarify escalation paths and decision authorities.

• Better tooling

  • Add or tune alerts to catch the signal earlier.
  • Create composite dashboards that match the tramline’s key frames.
  • Automate common actions (e.g., safe rollback, cache flush, feature flag toggles).

• Clearer roles and rituals

  • Define the incident commander role and responsibilities.
  • Establish a standard pattern: who updates the status page and how often.
  • Pre‑assign backups for key systems to avoid single‑point knowledge failures.

Make these follow‑ups visible and trackable in your usual work system (Jira, Linear, Asana, etc.), and, if possible, hang a small printout of the tramline near your team area as a reminder of what you learned.

Bringing It All Together

The Cardboard Outage Storyboard Tramline is low‑tech but high‑leverage:

• It turns scattered data into a coherent, visual narrative.
• It helps teams think like forensic investigators, not blame‑seekers.
• It leverages storyboard techniques—sequence, clarity, multiple viewpoints—without requiring any drawing skills.
• It naturally involves cross‑functional voices, surfacing hidden work and overlooked perspectives.
• It drives concrete improvements in runbooks, tooling, and roles.

Next time you run a post‑incident review, resist the urge to jump straight into a shared doc. Instead, grab paper, tape, and markers. Build a vertical time axis, pull in your evidence, and walk through the incident like a film crew watching dailies.

You may find that your most advanced incident analysis tool is not another dashboard—but a wall of cardboard scenes that finally shows everyone the same story.