Introduction: Why Your Small Incidents Aren’t Small

Most organizations only deeply analyze the big, headline outages—the ones that break SLAs, hit revenue, or wake executives. But the real story of your reliability lives in the tiny incidents: the five-minute API hiccup, the misconfigured feature flag, the partial slowdown in one region.

Individually, these look trivial. Collectively, they’re a goldmine.

Each "small" incident takes a path through your systems and your organization: alerts fire, people are paged, Slack channels spin up, dashboards refresh, decisions get made, work gets handed off. That invisible trail is where you find:

• Hidden dependencies
• Fragile handoffs between teams
• Communication gaps
• Tooling blind spots

The Pencil-Drawn Outage Atlas is a simple practice: use low-friction, hand-drawn style mapping to capture how incidents actually move—across services, teams, tools, and stakeholders—so you can see and improve your real reliability system.

You don’t need a new platform. You need a pencil, a simple template, and a commitment to turning every outage into a map you can learn from.

1. Start by Mapping the Smallest Possible Incident

Don’t wait for a major meltdown. Begin with the next small incident:

• A noisy alert that turned out to be nothing.
• A 502 spike that auto-recovered.
• A deployment that needed a quick rollback.

For each one, draw a before–during–after map:

1. Before – What was the system and org context?

   • Which services were involved?
   • Who was on call?
   • What dependencies existed (internal and external)?

2. During – How did the incident move?

   • Where did symptoms show up first (logs, metrics, user report)?
   • What alerts fired? Who saw them? In what tool?
   • What decisions were made, by whom, and based on what information?

3. After – How did things resolve?

   • What changed (config flips, rollbacks, failovers)?
   • When did everyone consider the incident “over”?
   • What follow-up was created?

Think of this as drawing a subway map of the outage: the incident starts at Station A (e.g., metrics spike), travels through Stations B, C, and D (pages, Slack, handoffs, dashboards), and eventually reaches Station Z (resolution + post-incident notes).

The goal is not artistic quality; it’s structural clarity.

2. Use Pencil-and-Paper Simplicity on Purpose

The moment mapping requires a special tool or perfect diagram, people stop doing it.

Design your outage atlas process so that anyone can sketch it, fast:

• Use basic shapes only:

  • Boxes = systems/services
  • Circles = people/roles
  • Arrows = flow of information or work
  • Lightning bolts = failure points / confusion moments

• Standard, minimalist labels:

  • "Alert fired"
  • "On-call acknowledged"
  • "Escalated to X"
  • "Waited for Y approval"
  • "Customer updated"

• Keep it tool-agnostic: whether someone uses a physical notebook, whiteboard, or a simple digital sketch tool, your mapping language stays the same.

Low fidelity is a feature, not a bug. When diagrams are quick and informal, people:

• Capture incidents while they’re still fresh.
• Feel less pressure to “get it perfect.”
• Are more honest about confusion and uncertainty.

Your only requirement: if you were involved in an outage, you can sketch its path in 10–15 minutes.

3. Treat Each Outage as a Paper Trail, Not a Crime Scene

Traditional postmortems can feel like investigations: who did what, who missed what, whose fault was this?

For the Pencil-Drawn Outage Atlas, shift to a different mindset: every outage is a chance to create a rich paper trail of:

• Handoffs (who passed work to whom, when)
• Decisions (what we chose, what we rejected)
• Context (what people believed at the time)

Instead of asking, "Who caused this?" ask:

• "Where did the incident go next?"
• "What were people seeing at each step?"
• "What options did they believe they had?"

Your map should show:

• Decision points – diamonds or notes where a choice was made (e.g., "Roll back vs. wait?" "Page database team?")
• Knowledge gaps – spots where someone lacked visibility or clarity (e.g., "Didn’t know service A depended on service B").
• Wasted loops – rework like, "We tried X, didn’t help, reverted, tried Y."

This isn’t about blame; it’s about reconstructing the path the incident took through your socio-technical system.

4. Combine Quantitative Signals with Human Stories

A pure data-driven timeline misses the reality of how incidents unfold.

Your outage atlas should blend:

Quantitative data

• Logs
• Metrics (latency, error rates, saturation)
• Traces
• Alert timelines and acknowledgments

Qualitative input

• On-call narratives: "Here’s what I saw", "Here’s why I chose that action"
• Slack/Teams snippets that show confusion or alignment
• Expert judgment: "We suspected the load balancer because of last quarter’s incident"

On your map, annotate arrows and nodes with both:

• "14:05 – Error rate > 5%" (metric)
• "Ops engineer: ‘Looks like last week’s cache issue’" (story)

This dual view is powerful because:

• Metrics show what happened and when.
• Stories show why people behaved as they did.

The atlas’s job is to reconcile those two perspectives.

5. Standardize Post-Incident Documentation Around the Map

Most orgs already have some form of post-incident document. The atlas doesn’t replace that; it anchors it.

Create a lightweight, standard template that always includes:

1. The Map

   • A snapshot or export of your hand-drawn flow.

2. Root Cause (Plural)

   • Technical contributing factors (e.g., config drift, unhandled edge case).
   • Organizational contributing factors (e.g., unclear ownership, slow escalation pathway).

3. Key Lessons

   • What surprised you?
   • What should we update about our mental model of the system?

4. Preventive / Improvement Actions

   • Short-term fixes.
   • Long-term investments.

5. Communication Review

   • Who needed to know what, when—did that happen?

The rule of thumb: if someone reads only the map + one page of notes, they should understand what happened, what you learned, and what you’ll do about it.

Store these in a searchable, shared place (Confluence, Notion, Git repo, etc.) and tag them by systems, teams, and themes (e.g., "alerting", "deploy", "dependencies").

Over time, this becomes your Outage Atlas Library.

6. Map the Human Network: Stakeholders and Communication Flows

Technology incidents are also communication incidents.

On your outage map, explicitly include:

• Who was informed – on-call only? Team leads? Customer support? Execs?
• How they were informed – Slack channel, email, status page, incident tool.
• When they were informed – early, late, or not at all.

Draw stakeholders as circles or groups, and use arrows to show information flow:

• Engineering ↔ SRE
• Engineering → Customer Support
• SRE → Status Page
• Engineering → Vendor

Mark breakdowns:

• Dashed arrow for "should have informed, but didn’t."
• Lightning bolt for "confusing or conflicting updates."

This surfaces patterns like:

• Support learning about outages from customers first.
• Product managers being looped in too late to set expectations.
• Multiple teams sending diverging messages to leadership.

Once visible, you can design better communication playbooks: clear ownership for external updates, expected timelines, and templates for executive briefings.

7. Turn the Atlas into an Onboarding and Training Superpower

Most onboarding explains how systems are supposed to work.

Your outage atlas library shows how they actually behave under stress.

Use it actively:

• In new hire onboarding: "Here are three real incidents in your area—let’s walk through the maps."
• In on-call training: "You’re the on-call. Start at the first alert on this map. What would you check? What might you try differently?"
• In cross-team sessions: "Notice how many times this incident bounced between our teams. How could we simplify that path?"

Pattern recognition emerges:

• The same dependency causing multiple incidents.
• The same misunderstanding recurring across roles.
• The same communication bottleneck appearing in different maps.

The atlas becomes a living curriculum of how incidents move end-to-end through your organization—far more concrete than a static architecture diagram.

8. Making It Stick: A Lightweight Ritual

To embed the Pencil-Drawn Outage Atlas into your culture, keep it small and repeatable:

• Trigger: Any incident above a minimal threshold (e.g., any page that woke someone, or any user-visible impact) gets a map.
• Owner: The primary responder starts a rough sketch within 24 hours.
• Refinement: In the post-incident review, the group walks the map and corrects it.
• Storage: The final map + short write-up get stored in your shared library.

Over time, you’ll:

• Reveal hidden dependencies between systems and teams.
• Discover process friction you never saw in your org chart.
• Improve both technical design and human coordination.

All without buying another tool.

Conclusion: Draw First, Optimize Second

Outages are not just failures of code or infrastructure; they’re journeys through your entire socio-technical ecosystem. By hand-mapping how tiny incidents travel through your organization, you:

• Make invisible dependencies visible.
• Turn stressful events into durable learning assets.
• Improve not just uptime, but coordination, communication, and onboarding.

The Pencil-Drawn Outage Atlas is deliberately low-tech: simple diagrams, quick sketches, human stories plus hard data. Its power comes from repetition and honesty, not polish.

Next incident—big or small—don’t just fix it and move on. Grab a pencil. Draw where it went. That map is your most accurate picture of how your organization really works when it matters most.