How do you plan for unplanned work such as fixing systems when they unexpectedly break in production? Just like firefighters – the best approach to practice those situations so that you are better prepared when they happen.

In this episode we have Mandi Walls, DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, explain why she loves Game Days where she is “practicing for the weird things that might happen”. Prior to her current role she worked for Chef and AOL – picking up a lot of the things she is now advocating for. In our conversation Mandi (@lnxchk) gives us insights into how to best prepare and run game days, shared her thoughts on what good chaos scenarios (unreliable backend, slow dns …) are and which health metrics (team health, # incidents out of hours, …) to look at in your current incident response to figure out what a good game day scenario actually is.

Mandi on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandiwalls/

In our talk we mentioned a couple of resources – here they are:

Mandi’s talk at DevOpsDays Raleigh: https://devopsdays.org/events/2022-raleigh/program/mandi-walls
Ops Guides: https://www.pagerduty.com/ops-guides/