Internal Platform Enablement
On-call Readiness and Paved Paths
A platform team improved on-call readiness, brought error-budget policy back into compliance, and accelerated paved-path adoption.
Context & challenge
Incident load and toil were rising unevenly across bespoke pipelines; error-budget policy was breached, and on-call health was fragile while the team tried to centralize workflows into an internal platform.
Headline results
Error-budget policy compliance lifted to 96% across platform-managed services.
Median MTTR improved from 58 minutes to 32 minutes while adoption grew.
Paved-path adoption reached more than half of services with clear guardrails.
Before / after metrics
Each metric links into the Metrics Dictionary for definitions and thresholds.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Error-budget policy compliance | Below policy on several services with uneven enforcement | Evidence |
| MTTR (median) | 58 minutes to restore from incidents | Evidence |
| Paved-path adoption | Ad hoc bespoke pipelines with limited observability | Evidence |
Decision snapshot
Selected decisions from the case, focusing on how outcomes, contributions, and evidence were handled.
- Outcome defined as readiness scores, error-budget policy, and adoption moving together, not just tool roll-out.
- A Decision Review Board (DRB) set thresholds for cohort expansion based on error-budget burn and on-call health.
- Paved paths shipped with runbooks and a tested rollback path; adoption expanded only when thresholds held.
- Weekly reviews applied a simple rule: reliability policy gates ship decisions and cohort expansion.
Read the KB case study
The Knowledge Base article includes lifecycle walkthroughs, thresholds, and links to supporting materials.