Game Day Exercises
A disaster recovery plan that has never been tested is a hypothesis. Anubiz Engineering designs and facilitates game day exercises — controlled failure scenarios that test your team's incident response, validate your runbooks, and reveal gaps in your recovery procedures before a real incident exposes them.
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Scenario Design
We design scenarios based on your actual risk profile: database failover, region outage, key dependency failure, security breach response, data corruption discovery, and deployment rollback under pressure. Each scenario has a clear objective, defined blast radius, success criteria, and abort conditions. Scenarios increase in complexity over time — start with a single-service failure, progress to multi-service cascading failures.
Exercise Facilitation
A facilitator injects the failure at a pre-announced time (initially — unannounced game days come later in maturity). The team responds using their normal incident process. The facilitator observes without intervening: Are the right people notified? Are runbooks followed? Is communication clear? Do escalation paths work? The facilitator has an abort switch to end the exercise if blast radius exceeds the planned scope.
Runbook Validation
Game days are the best runbook test. If an engineer cannot follow the runbook to resolve the scenario, the runbook is inadequate. We track every point where the responder deviates from the runbook — missing steps, outdated commands, incorrect dashboard links, unclear decision criteria. Post-exercise, runbooks are updated based on actual gaps discovered during the exercise.
Post-Exercise Review
After each game day, we run a structured review covering: detection time (how quickly was the failure noticed?), response time (how quickly was mitigation started?), communication effectiveness (were stakeholders informed appropriately?), runbook accuracy (did procedures work as documented?), and recovery completeness (was the system fully restored?). Findings feed into the reliability improvement backlog alongside real incident action items.
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