How Do You Infect Your Organization With Humane Ops?
A presentation at PagerDuty London Meetup in in London, UK by Matt Stratton
HOW TO INFECT YOUR ORGANIZATION WITH HUMANE OPS Matty Stratton DevOps Advocate, PagerDuty @mattstratton
@mattstratton
🔥📟 @mattstratton
@mattstratton
THE DATA 50,000 RESPONDERS RECEIVING A TOTAL OF 760 MILLION NOTIFICATIONS â–¸ 60 million notifications during dinner hours â–¸ 82 million notifications during evening hours â–¸ 250 million notifications during sleeping hours â–¸ 122 million notifications on weekends â–¸ A total of 750,000 nights with sleep-interrupting notifications â–¸ A total of 330,000 weekend days with interrupt notifications @mattstratton
LET’S HAVE SOME DATA THE MOST MEANINGFUL METRICS ON ATTRITION ARE ▸ Number of days where a responder’s work and life are interrupted ▸ Number of days when a responder is woken overnight ▸ Number of weekend days interrupted by notifications. @mattstratton
@mattstratton
EXAMPLES OF MEMES ARE TUNES, IDEAS, CATCH-PHRASES, CLOTHES FASHIONS, WAYS OF MAKING POTS OR OF BUILDING ARCHES. JUST AS GENES PROPAGATE THEMSELVES IN THE GENE POOL BY LEAPING FROM BODY TO BODY, SO MEMES PROPAGATE THEMSELVES IN THE MEME POOL BY LEAPING FROM BRAIN TO BRAIN VIA IMITATION. @mattstratton Richard Dawkins @mattstratton
SNOW CRASH ▸ In the book, “Snow Crash” itself is a neurallinguistic virus. ▸ The bad guys figure out how to unlock it, and it spreads from hacker to hacker like a meme ▸ Plus, lots of swordplay “IDEOLOGY IS A VIRUS.” - NEAL STEPHENSON @mattstratton
WHAT IF YOU ARE THE SUPREME LEADER? ▸ “Command and control” doesn’t work ▸ Use measurement for good, not for evil ▸ Avoid “executive swoop” @mattstratton
WHAT IF YOU ARE THE SUPREME LEADER? ▸ “Command and control” doesn’t work ▸ Use measurement for good, not for evil ▸ Avoid “executive swoop” @mattstratton
MIDDLE MANAGEMENT TIPS â–¸ Encourage safe post-incident review spaces â–¸ Drive for a culture of learning â–¸ Take care of your people @mattstratton
REVIEW. REVIEW. REVIEW A CULTURE OF LEARNING ▸ In a generative, performance-oriented organization, “failure leads to inquiry.” ▸ Don’t take my word for it. Ask Ron Westrum. ▸ You can also ask Dr. Nicole Forsgren - @nicolefv http://bit.ly/2KpzKKW @mattstratton
USE THE FORCE, EVEN IF YOU AREN’T A JEDI @mattstratton
REVIEW ALL THE THINGS @mattstratton
HAND-OFF TIME THE ON-CALL REVIEW ▸ Primary purpose is to understand on-call load and pain ▸ Approximately a week’s worth of on-call history is common ▸ Take about 30 minutes, give or take @mattstratton
ON-CALL REVIEW, CONTINUED â–¸ Typically instituted by a team manager â–¸ Usually run by on-call responders â–¸ Minimum attendees are the team manager, outgoing on-call, and incoming oncall â–¸ BETTER PRACTICE - include the entire team! @mattstratton
REVIEW. REVIEW. REVIEW NORMALIZATION OF DEVIANCE â–¸ The gradual process through which unacceptable practice or standards become acceptable. As the deviant behavior is repeated without catastrophic results, it becomes the social norm for the organization. â–¸ This happened to NASA. Twice. â–¸ In our case, we start to accept alerts or degradations as acceptable. http://bit.ly/2Ihj1wV @mattstratton
QUESTION METRICS @mattstratton
QUESTION METRICS WHY ARE WE USING THESE NUMBERS? ▸ What is the data that drive your incident process ▸ Are your metrics tied to business outcomes? ▸ Correlation doesn’t always equal causation @mattstratton
SIMPLE. ALWAYS. @mattstratton
KEEP IT SIMPLE THE MORE RESILIENTLY THE SYSTEM IS DESIGNED, THE MORE LIKELY IT IS TO CAUSE A NEGATIVE BUSINESS IMPACT Stratton’s Law of Catastrophic Predestination @mattstratton
COMMUNICATE. TALK TO PEOPLE â–¸ Who are your customers? What are their expectations? â–¸ Whose customer are you? Can you help them out? â–¸ What are the perceptions of your team? @mattstratton
HUMANS, PEOPLE ARE â–¸ Consider contextual on-call â–¸ The Golden Rule â–¸ Bake cookies @mattstratton
LEARN TO TAKE COMMAND INCIDENT COMMAND @mattstratton
MAKE IT NICE ON THE BRIDGE DURING A CALL ▸ Have clearly defined roles ▸ Avoid bystander effect ▸ Rally fast, disband faster ▸ Don’t litigate severity ▸ Have a clear mechanism for making decisions @mattstratton
SHARING IS CARING SHARE ALL TESTS @mattstratton
SHARE ALL TESTS TESTS ARE FOR SWE AND SRE BOTH â–¸ All functional tests used in preproduction should have a corresponding monitor in production â–¸ All monitoring functionality in production should have corresponding tests in the build/release process â–¸ Monitoring is testing with at time dimension. There should be full parity between preproduction and production. @mattstratton
EVERY SPRINT DO ONE NICE THING @mattstratton
HELP YOUR RESPONDERS IN EACH AND EVERY SPRINT ▸ In each sprint/work unit, add value to your responders ▸ Even if it’s not on a card ▸ You rebel, you. @mattstratton
ADDING VALUE SOME EXAMPLES ▸ Provide better context in logging (stacktraces alone don’t count) ▸ Remove some technical debt. Yes, you have some. ▸ Add some (useful) tests ▸ Remove something unused @mattstratton
ADDING VALUE ▸ If you use feature flags, add a description field to the configuration ▸ If you use runbooks, ensure they are up to date every time you cut a release. If you don’t do this, abandon the runbook altogether (an incorrect runbook is considered harmful) ▸ SIMPLIFY, MAN! @mattstratton
@MATTSTRATTON LINKEDIN.COM/IN/MATTSTRATTON MATTSTRATTON.COM ARRESTEDDEVOPS.COM SHARE YOUR ON-CALL STORIES WITH ME LATER @mattstratton
SPEAKING.MATTSTRATTON.COM @mattstratton
FURTHER READING AND REFERENCES â–¸ Improving Your Employee Retention With Real-Time Ops Data - http://bit.ly/ 2rGTnq4 â–¸ Page It Forward! - http://bit.ly/2In8Lzc â–¸ The study of information flow: A personal journey - http://bit.ly/2KpzKKW â–¸ The Normalization of Deviance (If It Can Happen to NASA, It Can Happen to You) - http://bit.ly/2Ihj1wV @mattstratton
â–¸ Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson - http://bit.ly/2Iiuc8L â–¸ The Cybersecurity Canon: Snow Crash - http://bit.ly/2InDYGI â–¸ Disasters! Arrested DevOps Episode 37 - https://arresteddevops.com/37 â–¸ PagerDuty Incident Response - https://response.pagerduty.com â–¸ Operational Reviews - https://reviews.pagerduty.com @mattstratton
Richard Dawkins described memes as being a form of cultural propagation, which is a way for people to transmit social memories and cultural ideas to each other. Not unlike the way that DNA and life will spread from location to location, a meme idea will also travel from mind to mind.
Getting your organization to take a step back and look at how ops affects people (awareness of alert fatigue, burnout risk, proactive/reactive approaches) can be a tough challenge.
In this talk, I will discuss how the very DNA of an organization can evolve through the use of actionable communications from all levels - management, strategy, and practitioners. The “virus” of humane ops will infect your organization, providing a more sustainable approach to on-call, incident resolution, post-mortems, and more. There also will be copious references to the Neal Stephenson classic novel, Snow Crash.
After this talk, you will have ideas of practical approaches to effect change in your organization, regardless of your level of influence. While not every group will use the same “viruses”, you will take away a good understanding of where to get started as Patient Zero.
Resources
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