Does this sound familiar?
The alarms are flashing.
The clients are emailing.
Upper management is calling.
Line managers are DM-ing.
You are trying to juggle all of this while trying to follow a 50-line paragraph of troubleshooting text...
Let's borrow the Graphviz tools from the systems architect to make easier-to-follow incident response plans.
digraph Jira_Outage
{
{
first_notification [
label="Notification of a Jira outage from any channel"
shape=rect
]
pc_browser [
label="Does Jira load in a PC Browser?"
shape=rect
]
yes_pc_browser [
label="Yes"
shape=rect
]
no_pc_browser [
label="No"
shape=rect
]
linux_server_browser [
label="Does Jira load in\nFirefox from a Linux server?"
shape=rect
]
user_ssh_connect [
label="Does SSH-ing to jira.internal.hostname connect?"
shape=rect
]
yes_user_ssh_connect [
label="Yes"
shape=rect
]
no_user_ssh_connect [
label="No"
shape=rect
]
debug_screen [
label="Jira shows an unexpected screen."
shape=rect
]
pingable [
label="Does jira.internal.hostname ping?"
shape=rect
]
host_down [
label="Application host is down.\n\n\Attempt to restart application."
shape=rect
]
yes_ping [
label="Yes"
shape=rect
]
no_ping [
label="No"
shape=rect
]
site_down [
label="Site is down.\n\nSwitch to backup site."
shape=rect
]
first_notification -> pc_browser
pc_browser -> no_pc_browser
pc_browser -> yes_pc_browser
no_pc_browser -> user_ssh_connect
yes_pc_browser -> debug_screen
user_ssh_connect -> no_user_ssh_connect
user_ssh_connect -> yes_user_ssh_connect
yes_user_ssh_connect -> linux_server_browser
no_user_ssh_connect -> pingable
pingable -> no_ping
pingable -> yes_ping
yes_ping -> host_down
no_ping -> site_down
linux_server_browser -> site_down
debug_screen -> host_down
}
}
into handsome instructional flowcharts like this:
I'm sure you're wondering why I prefer Graphviz to any of the plethora of free SVG diagramming tools. Besides fundamental masochism, using dot allows for automatic document (re)generation in the face of hosts being added/deleted/changed.
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