Use case · Ops / Reliability Lead
Reliability Recovery After Incidents
Use C2O to recover from incident spikes and error-budget burn by turning ad-hoc incident decisions into explicit guardrails, thresholds, and escalation rules across the lifecycle.
Outcome
Error-budget burn returns to policy, pages per shift drop to a sustainable level, and incident decisions move from anecdote to documented thresholds and playbooks—so reliability improves without burning people out.
Good fit when...
- Your error budgets are consistently blown or ignored
- On-call is noisy and feels unfair
- Incident "fixes" get relitigated in every meeting
Signals that matter
Each signal is backed by the metrics dictionary and the Reliability Recovery After Incident Spikes case study, so you can see how guardrails changed behaviour over time.
Run this now
Start by framing reliability as an outcome, not just incident counts. Then map who Drives and Enables incident work, and use Decide/Run playbooks to reset SLO policy and error-budget guardrails.
Templates
Outcome Definition Worksheet (Reliability)
XLSXFrame reliability as an outcome, not just incident counts. Define guardrails for error-budget burn, pages per shift, and decision latency.
Contribution Mapping Canvas (Incidents)
XLSXMap who Drives and Enables incident work across phases so reliability decisions have clear owners.
Playbooks
Run: Reliability & Error Budgets Playbook
KB ArticleReset SLO policy and error-budget guardrails to shape on-call posture for incident-heavy services.
Decide: Incident & Risk Decisions
KB ArticleUse decision ladders and thresholds to drive incident-related decisions without relitigation.
Decision Ladder
Click each level to learn when to escalate
Decision rights
Decision Ladders for Reliability
Clarify who Drives incident decisions, when to escalate, and which thresholds gate shipping, rollback, or incident closure—so you can move from "hero mode" to consistent, auditable reliability decisions.
View Decision Rights hubWhat practitioners say
Real feedback from teams using C2O for reliability recovery after incidents
“We cut our pages-per-shift from 12 to 4 in the first month. The escalation ladder gave on-call engineers confidence to make decisions without waking up leadership.”
David Park
SRE Manager, E-commerce Platform
“Before C2O, every incident felt like a fire drill. Now we have documented thresholds and playbooks—our MTTR dropped 40%.”
Elena Rodriguez
Principal Reliability Engineer
Case proof
Before/after metrics and decision records from a Reliability Recovery After Incident Spikes initiative, showing how C2O helped bring error-budget burn back into policy and reduce incident noise.
Reliability Recovery After Incident Spikes
Before/after metrics and decision records from a Reliability Recovery After Incident Spikes initiative, showing how C2O helped bring error-budget burn back into policy and reduce incident noise.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Error budget burn | 22% burned per 7 days at peak | Evidence |
| Incident rate | Frequent user-impacting incidents with unclear triggers | Evidence |
Explore other use cases
Once you've run this scenario, consider these related use cases to extend C2O across more of your work.