How to spot incident readiness gaps before a real outage
You don’t need a major outage to discover readiness gaps. Small signals expose what is missing.
Look at the first 10 minutes
Review recent incidents and ask:
- Did we choose a truth dashboard quickly?
- Did we know the safe mitigation?
- Did comms have a consistent cadence?
If any answer is “no,” your runbook is incomplete.
Track the unknowns
If responders say “I don’t know” more than once per incident, you have a knowledge gap.
Run a short tabletop
A 45-minute drill is enough to expose missing runbook steps and ownership gaps.
Inspect runbook usage
If runbooks aren’t opened during incidents, they aren’t usable.
Measure two leading signals
- Time to first mitigation.
- Number of escalations in the first 30 minutes.
Readiness gaps are visible long before a crisis. You just need to measure the first checks.