Flowcharts for incident response
lbonanomi
・1 min read
Old Geek, New Tricks (4 Part Series)
Does this sound familiar?
The alarms are flashing.
The clients are emailing.
Upper management is calling.
Line managers are DM-ing.
You are trying to juggle all of this while trying to follow a 50-line paragraph of troubleshooting text...
Let's borrow the Graphviz tools from the systems architect to make easier-to-follow incident response plans.
digraph Jira_Outage
{
{
first_notification [
label="Notification of a Jira outage from any channel"
shape=rect
]
pc_browser [
label="Does Jira load in a PC Browser?"
shape=rect
]
yes_pc_browser [
label="Yes"
shape=rect
]
no_pc_browser [
label="No"
shape=rect
]
linux_server_browser [
label="Does Jira load in\nFirefox from a Linux server?"
shape=rect
]
user_ssh_connect [
label="Does SSH-ing to jira.internal.hostname connect?"
shape=rect
]
yes_user_ssh_connect [
label="Yes"
shape=rect
]
no_user_ssh_connect [
label="No"
shape=rect
]
debug_screen [
label="Jira shows an unexpected screen."
shape=rect
]
pingable [
label="Does jira.internal.hostname ping?"
shape=rect
]
host_down [
label="Application host is down.\n\n\Attempt to restart application."
shape=rect
]
yes_ping [
label="Yes"
shape=rect
]
no_ping [
label="No"
shape=rect
]
site_down [
label="Site is down.\n\nSwitch to backup site."
shape=rect
]
first_notification -> pc_browser
pc_browser -> no_pc_browser
pc_browser -> yes_pc_browser
no_pc_browser -> user_ssh_connect
yes_pc_browser -> debug_screen
user_ssh_connect -> no_user_ssh_connect
user_ssh_connect -> yes_user_ssh_connect
yes_user_ssh_connect -> linux_server_browser
no_user_ssh_connect -> pingable
pingable -> no_ping
pingable -> yes_ping
yes_ping -> host_down
no_ping -> site_down
linux_server_browser -> site_down
debug_screen -> host_down
}
}
into handsome instructional flowcharts like this:
I'm sure you're wondering why I prefer Graphviz to any of the plethora of free SVG diagramming tools. Besides fundamental masochism, using dot
allows for automatic document (re)generation in the face of hosts being added/deleted/changed.
Old Geek, New Tricks (4 Part Series)