10 Ways to Make Your Outage Emergency Room Fun
November 03, 2017

Andrew Marshall
Cedexis

It's 3:47am. You and the rest of the Ops team have been summoned from your peaceful slumber to mitigate an application delivery outage. As you catch up on the frantic emails, Slack chats, and text messages from everyone on your international sales team (Every. Single. One.), your mind races as you switch to problem solving mode. It's time to start thinking about how to make this mitigation FUN!

1. Gently remind everyone that the SaaS-delivered automated Application Delivery strategy you proposed would have prevented this

No need to rub it in, but … if you had turned on a software-defined application delivery platform for your hybrid infrastructure, you'd all be sound asleep right now. Automated real-time delivery decisions and failover would be nice, right? Just sayin'.

2. Drop a generationally-divisive Giphy in the emergency Slack channel

Your coworkers' opinions on gaming consoles, Spiderman movies, and music are different than yours! The perfect animated GIF will remind them of your erudite tastes, while you have their attention. Extra credit if you can work in some low-key shade about not listening to your equally sophisticated opinions on optimized outage mitigation.

3. Hold an impromptu Cloud Health Dashboard page customization contest

Oh hey, look at that! Your cloud provider's health dashboard page says everything is fine…because it's powered by the services that went down. Help your team vent their creative energy (and frustration) with some fun customized MS Paint updates to the offending page. Bonus points for art that reminds everyone of the value of a multi-cloud strategy powered by a programmable application delivery platform.

4. Use health metrics to cure ills instead of just conducting another really good post-mortem

Tired of “learning lessons” from these emergency room drills? You depend on NGINX for your LLB, but don't have a way to use those LLB health metrics and data to automate global delivery. Disjointed delivery intelligence means you don't know how your apps will land with users. You need an end user-centric approach to app delivery that automates the best delivery path and ensures failover is in place at all times. Micro-outages often fly under your passive monitoring radar, but that doesn't mean your users don't notice them. An active, integrated app delivery approach re-routes automatically before you lose business. Post-mortems are fun…but so is making sure your apps survive the last mile. Arguably more so?

5. Open (and then close) some tickets for the sales team

“Sales needs to sell more stuff.” You'll feel better.

6. Build a countdown clock for when you can finally replace your old ADC hardware

Sure, your Mode1 ADC hardware was a sunk cost so you're stuck with them for a while. But you're one unnecessary emergency closer to having a fully software-defined application delivery platform for your hybrid cloud. And now you're even closer. And closer … Tick. Tock.

7. Leverage real user measurements (RUM) to foresee and fix problems before they happen

Probably best to do this during normal work hours. User experience data from around the world can detect degrading, sluggish resources in real-time, and user-centric app delivery logic powered by RUM can make quick re-routing decisions automatically. No more getting woken up after the application crashes. While you're wishing you had RUM on your side, you can look up some fun facts from the countries experiencing app outages. Did you know Luxembourgish is an official language?

8. Send an email

You too can be the weird colleague who sends emails with crazy, middle-of-the-night time stamps.

9. Do some virtual window shopping

Browse around to see what you could have purchased with the money you were just forced to spend on unplanned cloud instance provisioning in order to keep your app running. That desktop Nerf missile launcher (or 700 of them) would have been pretty nice.

10. Swear off the game of chance

You've just proven it's not that much fun after all. Don't just dump everything onto one cloud and call it done. Clouds go down for so many reasons. Use an application delivery platform control layer to build in the capability to auto-switch to an available resource, while you sleep soundly. Running on multi-cloud without an abstracted control layer removes most of the value of the cloud. Swear off the game of chance. Out loud. Right now.

Andrew Marshall is Director of Product Marketing at Cedexis
Share this

Industry News

May 14, 2025

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the launch of the Cybersecurity Skills Framework, a global reference guide that helps organizations identify and address critical cybersecurity competencies across a broad range of IT job families; extending beyond cybersecurity specialists.

May 14, 2025

CodeRabbit is now available on the Visual Studio Code editor.

The integration brings CodeRabbit’s AI code reviews directly into Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code at the earliest stages of software development—inside the code editor itself—at no cost to the developers.

May 14, 2025

Chainguard announced Chainguard Libraries for Python, an index of malware-resistant Python dependencies built securely from source on SLSA L2 infrastructure.

May 14, 2025

Sysdig announced the donation of Stratoshark, the company’s open source cloud forensics tool, to the Wireshark Foundation.

May 13, 2025

Pegasystems unveiled Pega Predictable AI™ Agents that give enterprises extraordinary control and visibility as they design and deploy AI-optimized processes.

May 13, 2025

Kong announced the introduction of the Kong Event Gateway as a part of their unified API platform.

May 13, 2025

Azul and Moderne announced a technical partnership to help Java development teams identify, remove and refactor unused and dead code to improve productivity and dramatically accelerate modernization initiatives.

May 13, 2025

Parasoft has added Agentic AI capabilities to SOAtest, featuring API test planning and creation.

May 13, 2025

Zerve unveiled a multi-agent system engineered specifically for enterprise-grade data and AI development.

May 12, 2025

LambdaTest, a unified agentic AI and cloud engineering platform, has announced its partnership with MacStadium, the industry-leading private Mac cloud provider enabling enterprise macOS workloads, to accelerate its AI-native software testing by leveraging Apple Silicon.

May 12, 2025

Tricentis announced a new capability that injects Tricentis’ AI-driven testing intelligence into SAP’s integrated toolchain, part of RISE with SAP methodology.

May 12, 2025

Zencoder announced the launch of Zen Agents, delivering two innovations that transform AI-assisted development: a platform enabling teams to create and share custom agents organization-wide, and an open-source marketplace for community-contributed agents.

May 08, 2025

AWS announced the preview of the Amazon Q Developer integration in GitHub.

May 08, 2025

The OpenSearch Software Foundation, the vendor-neutral home for the OpenSearch Project, announced the general availability of OpenSearch 3.0.

May 08, 2025

Jozu raised $4 million in seed funding.