Incident simulations
Build incident muscle memory before production does it for you.
DawnOps simulations are realistic, repeatable, and tied to measurable improvement. Teams practice diagnosis, mitigation, and communication under the constraints they actually have.
The hard parts, on purpose.
Simulations that feel like real incidents: noisy signals, uncertainty, and tradeoffs.
Diagnosis under ambiguity
Conflicting signals, partial context, and multiple plausible hypotheses, just like the real thing.
Safe mitigation
Practice low-risk mitigations first (flags, rollback, degrade) and verify impact step-by-step.
Comms and coordination
Use a consistent incident cadence: who’s leading, who’s communicating, and what updates look like.
A simulation format that fits busy teams.
Run a high-value drill in 60 minutes without disrupting delivery.
Prep (10 min)
Pick a failure mode, define success criteria, and gather the dashboards/runbooks responders will use.
Run (30–35 min)
Inject signals, force decision points, and track the timeline: TTD, TTM, and key comms updates.
Debrief (15–20 min)
Capture gaps, update runbooks, and assign follow-ups while the context is still fresh.
Repeat
Re-run quarterly to measure trendlines and expand to new failure modes as systems evolve.
What you get after a few cycles.
The goal isn’t theatrics; it’s measurable capability.
Faster diagnosis
Teams learn where to look first and how to narrow hypotheses quickly.
Cleaner mitigations
Fewer risky changes under pressure; more safe paths with verification baked in.
Better runbooks
Runbooks evolve from “docs” into reliable playbooks validated by reps.