RolesRole: IT operations / site reliability
Practise your first on-call incident before it's real
Lead an outage from the first alert to the all-clear: investigate, roll back, communicate and write it up, in a simulated company where nothing real breaks.
- Runs in
- A web browser, 3D included
- One exercise
- 20 to 55 minutes
- Practice levels
- Six, from worked example to exam
- Working tools
- 3 used in these exercises
A real exercise
Checkout errors jump right after a release. Dashboards, logs and the deploy history point in different directions. You find the flag that broke payments, switch it off without switching off the rest, and tell support what to say to customers.
How it works
Every exercise follows the same rhythm as the real job: a problem arrives, you investigate, you act, and the simulated company responds.
- 01
You're paged
Alerts fire and customers can't pay.
- 02
Investigate
Dashboards, logs, the release pipeline and the people who own the service.
- 03
Mitigate
Roll back or switch off the broken feature, safely.
- 04
Communicate and review
Updates during the incident and a clear timeline afterwards.
What you practise
Concrete tasks taken from the exercises on this page. Each one is done with real data, under real constraints, inside the same simulated company.
- T01
Incident command
Decide priorities, assign work and keep the response organised.
- T02
Release forensics
Find which change caused the problem.
- T03
Feature flags and rollbacks
Reduce the damage without causing more.
- T04
Stakeholder updates
Plain, accurate updates for non-engineers.
What you get
Experience you can point to.
- 01
Calm under pressure
You've been through it before, so the real page is less frightening.
- 02
A method
A repeatable way to work through any incident.
- 03
Interview examples
Concrete incidents you handled and can talk through.
The tools you work with
Working tools, not screenshots. They read the same live data as the rest of the simulated company, and what you change in one shows up in the others.
- 01
Incident console
The live state of services and hosts during an outage, with the runbook actions.
- 02
Feature flags
The switches a service reads, and which one is breaking it.
- 03
Data pipelines
The pipelines feeding production, and which one is sending bad data.
Six levels, one exercise
Start by watching it done, then take the hints away one step at a time until you can do it alone.
- L1
Watch it done
The exercise solved step by step, with what each step changed.
- Hints
- Read only
- Graded
- No
- L2
Step by step
The next move is pointed out, every hint is open, goals update as you work.
- Hints
- All hints
- Graded
- Yes
- L3
With hints
Every hint is open, but finding the next step is up to you.
- Hints
- All hints
- Graded
- Yes
- L4
On your own
Hints stop short of the worked answer. Goals still update as you go.
- Hints
- Some hints
- Graded
- Yes
- L5
Exam
No hints and no AI helper. Results appear only after you submit.
- Hints
- None
- Graded
- Yes
- L6
Free play
An open what-if sandbox. Try anything; nothing counts towards a grade.
- Hints
- All hints
- Graded
- No
A debrief after every attempt
You see what went well, what did not, and what a stronger approach looks like, based on what you actually did.
Every action, in order
What was checked, who was asked, what was changed and when. Nothing is overwritten.
Scores by skill
Each exercise scores the skills it was built to test, from what was actually done.
Weak habits, flagged
Poor patterns in how the work was done are flagged, not only wrong final answers.
A replay of the attempt
Step through the session as it happened, with typed personal details masked.
- You're paged
- Investigate
- Mitigate
- Communicate and review
What is a site reliability engineer?
An engineer who keeps software services running: monitoring them, responding when they break, and making them more reliable over time.
Do I need to know a specific cloud provider?
No. The simulated company has its own services and tools, so the skills carry over to any stack.
Related
Ready to try it?
Create an account and start your first exercise. It runs in your browser.