Introduction: When Risk Creeps In Like a Tide

Most outages don’t arrive as a surprise storm. They creep in quietly.

A few more alerts than usual. A brittle service that’s “mostly fine.” A risky deployment that got waved through because there was “no time” to discuss it. None of these alone feel like an emergency—but together they raise the waterline of operational risk.

The problem? That rising tide is hard to feel when risk is scattered across dashboards, tickets, and chat threads.

This is where a deceptively simple tool can change the game: a hand‑drawn incident story tidechart. By literally sketching daily “risk swells” on paper or a whiteboard, teams can see risk accumulating before it breaks into outages.

In this post, we’ll explore:

• What a paper incident story tidechart is
• How to draw and use one in daily SRE practice
• Why combining hand‑drawn visuals with modern tooling improves reliability
• How visualizing risk as a tide transforms how your team manages incidents

What Is an Incident Story Tidechart?

Think of a tidechart as a simple, visual timeline of how risky your system feels over the course of days.

On paper, it often looks like:

• A horizontal axis for time (days or shifts)
• A vertical axis for perceived risk level, from “low tide” (calm, boring) to “high tide” (on the edge of an incident)
• A line or wave that rises and falls as risk accumulates or recedes
• Annotations showing what’s driving each swell: deployments, alerts, capacity scares, third‑party issues, near‑misses, etc.

It’s not meant to be perfectly quantitative. It’s a storytelling tool. The purpose is to turn raw incident signals into an at‑a‑glance visual that everyone—engineers, managers, and partners—can understand.

Instead of asking, “What are our P95 latencies?” you can point at the chart and say, “We’ve been riding high tide for three days—here’s why.”

Why Hand‑Drawn? The Power of Simple, Physical Artifacts

With all the dashboards and observability tools available, it can feel almost primitive to grab a marker and draw risk on a wall. That’s exactly why it works.

1. It’s instantly human‑readable

You don’t need Grafana permissions or a training session. A hand‑drawn tidechart:

• Shows trend at a glance: are we safer than yesterday, or not?
• Makes cause‑and‑effect visible (e.g., “this risky release coincides with rising alerts”)
• Works for both technical and non‑technical stakeholders

A product manager, on‑call engineer, and engineering director can all stand in front of it and have the same conversation about risk.

2. It bypasses cognitive overload

Teams are already drowning in:

• Alert streams
• Metrics dashboards
• Incident timelines
• Ticket queues

The tidechart doesn’t replace these; it summarizes their implications. It translates a noisy system into a single, coherent shape: a rising or falling tide.

3. It invites conversation

Because it’s physical—a piece of paper, a whiteboard, a wall chart—people naturally gather around it. They:

• Point to a spike and ask, “What happened here?”
• Notice gradual buildup: “We’ve been drifting higher all week.”
• Negotiate priorities: “We should pause feature rollouts until the tide recedes.”

This shared artifact makes risk a visible, team‑owned concern instead of an abstract metric hidden in tools.

How to Draw a Daily Risk Tidechart

You don’t need a design background. You just need consistency and honesty.

Step 1: Choose your time scale

Most teams start with daily resolution:

• One tick on the horizontal axis = one day
• Optional: distinguish weekdays vs weekends, or shifts if you run 24/7

For very high‑change environments, you might use per‑shift instead.

Step 2: Define your risk levels (loosely)

On the vertical axis, label from bottom to top, for example:

• Low tide – “Boring, stable, uneventful”
• Rising swell – “More alerts, some fragility, things feel tense”
• High tide – “Near‑misses, juggling multiple issues, on‑call is stretched”
• Breaking waves – “Incidents, paging storms, one step from an outage”

Keep it qualitative. The goal is not to pin down a precise number, but to reflect the team’s collective sense of risk.

Step 3: Hold a short daily ritual

During stand‑up or a dedicated 5–10 minute risk huddle:

1. Ask: “How high does the tide feel today compared to yesterday?”
2. Draw a point for today’s “tide level.”
3. Connect it to the previous day’s point with a line.
4. Add brief annotations for what influenced today’s risk:
   • “New payment service rollout”
   • “Spike in DB timeouts overnight”
   • “Cloud provider incident yesterday”
   • “Cleared backlog of retries, risk reduced”

The rule of thumb: if it affected how safe or fragile the system feels, it belongs on the chart.

Step 4: Look for swells, not just spikes

The real value emerges not from a single day, but from trends:

• A gradual rise over several days with no major incident yet
• Recurring swells after particular types of changes
• High tide periods that precede major outages

This helps shift thinking from, “Today is fine, no incidents,” to “We’ve been accumulating risk for a week; an incident is likely if we keep pushing.”

From Metrics to Action: Why Visualizing Risk Matters

Many teams have excellent metrics but struggle to turn them into decisions. The tidechart closes that gap.

It makes urgency visible

A chart with three consecutive days at high tide tells a story that’s hard to ignore. It supports conversations like:

• “We should slow down feature releases until this tide recedes.”
• “We need to prioritize reliability work in this sprint, not just new features.”

Instead of arguing over individual graphs, you’re aligning around the shape of risk.

It surfaces small signals and near‑misses

Not every risk swell comes from a Sev‑1 incident. The tidechart invites you to log:

• Near‑misses (“We almost ran out of capacity.”)
• Weak signals (“Error rate uptick that self‑resolved, but feels suspicious.”)
• Increased toil (“On‑call spent 4 hours on manual restarts yesterday.”)

Over time, patterns emerge. You might find that months of “almost incidents” all trace back to a single fragile dependency.

It bridges technical and non‑technical stakeholders

For leaders and partners who don’t live in your dashboards, the tidechart turns reliability into a narrative they can follow:

• “Here’s when we pushed hard on features.”
• “Here’s when the tide rose and incidents started.”
• “Here’s when we invested in fixes and the tide receded.”

This makes trade‑offs clearer—and easier to justify.

Combining Paper Tidecharts with Modern Incident Tooling

A paper tidechart isn’t a replacement for your incident management stack. It’s the front page of your reliability story.

Here’s how to integrate it:

• Inputs from tools: Use incident software, alerting, and logs to inform your sense of daily tide level.
• Links back to systems: For any notable swell, include references like incident IDs or JIRA ticket numbers.
• Photograph & archive: At the end of each week or sprint, snap a photo of the tidechart and store it alongside your incident reports.
• Review in retrospectives: Pull up past tidecharts in post‑mortems and quarterly reviews. Ask, “What were we feeling before this big outage?”

This workflow lets tools do what they’re good at—precision, history, correlations—while the tidechart does what humans need: intuitive, shared awareness.

Reinforcing Core SRE Goals with a Daily Tide Ritual

Integrating the tidechart into SRE routines amplifies several core reliability goals.

1. Reducing toil

By seeing the tide rise due to recurring manual work, you can:

• Justify automation work with a visible pattern of “toil swells”
• Prioritize fixes that meaningfully lower the daily tide

It keeps toil from being invisible background noise.

2. Improving system reliability

Because the tidechart emphasizes trends and accumulation, it nudges teams toward preventive action:

• Pause risky changes during high tide
• Schedule reliability sprints after prolonged swells
• Invest in resilience before the next outage surfaces

3. Learning from near‑misses and “small” incidents

SRE culture values learning from everything, not just the big failures. The tidechart turns:

• Near‑misses into visible part of the risk story
• Minor incidents into context for major ones

Over time, you’re not just reacting—you’re building a more strategic prevention mindset.

4. Building shared situational awareness

Most importantly, the daily ritual of drawing the tide:

• Aligns everyone’s mental model of how risky things feel
• Encourages stronger collaboration (“What’s driving this swell?”)
• Creates a natural decision point: “Do we keep pushing, or slow down?”

This shared awareness is crucial when deciding to trade speed for safety—or vice versa.

How to Get Started This Week

You can pilot the practice with almost no overhead.

1. Pick a visible surface: A team whiteboard, a physical poster, or even a sheet of paper taped near your team area or in your virtual workspace (shared doc + daily snapshot).
2. Define simple levels: Low, medium, high, very high. Don’t overthink it.
3. Add a 5‑minute slot to stand‑up: Ask, “Where’s the tide today and why?” Draw it.
4. Stick with it for 2–4 weeks: Real value comes from seeing trends develop.
5. Review together: After a month, look back. What patterns do you notice? What decisions would you make differently with this awareness?

If it feels useful, refine it. If it doesn’t, adjust what you track. The practice should serve your team—not the other way around.

Conclusion: Make Risk Visible Before It Breaks

Systems rarely fail without warning. The warnings just tend to be scattered, subtle, and easy to rationalize away.

A hand‑drawn incident story tidechart doesn’t eliminate risk, but it makes risk visible and discussable. It turns:

• Raw signals into shared intuition
• Metrics into decisions
• Isolated incidents into a continuous story of rising and falling risk

By framing risk as a tide, your team starts thinking in terms of trends, accumulation, and deliberate prevention, not just firefighting.

All it takes to begin is a marker, a bit of wall space, and a commitment to pause each day and ask: “How high is the tide today—and what are we going to do about it?”