Game Day
A scheduled practice session where teams simulate incidents to test response procedures.
A scheduled practice session where teams simulate incidents to test response procedures.
## "Fire Drill for Engineering" A **Game Day** is a safe, scheduled time to break things and practice fixing them. ### Goals 1. **Test the Humans**: Does everyone know their role? Do they know how to open the war room? 2. **Test the Runbooks**: Are the instructions accurate? 3. **Test the Tools**: Did PagerDuty actually page the right person? ### How to Run a Game Day 1. **Design**: The "Master of Disaster" creates a secret scenario (e.g., "Database runs out of connections"). 2. **Execute**: They trigger the failure in Staging (or Prod). 3. **Respond**: The team treats it like a real SEV1. 4. **Review**: Debrief immediately. "Our runbook for DB restart was wrong."
ExThe Outdated Access Key
"During a Game Day, the team tried to failover to a backup region."
Why Game Day Matters
You don't want to figure out incident response during a real incident. Game days build muscle memory.
Teams that practice together respond faster and with less stress.