Full technical details on Asana's worst outage

Post by dogma1138 » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 1:32 PM UTC

bognition wrote: post #26

katzgrau wrote: post #24

These sort of deeply apologetic and hyper-transparent post-mortems have become commonplace, but sometimes I wonder how beneficial they are. Customers appreciate transparency, but perhaps delving into the fine details of the investigation (various hypotheses, overlooked warning signs, yada yada) might actually end up leaving the customer more unsettled than they would have been otherwise. Today I learned that Asana ha…

I work at a shop that does these kinds of post mortems. I find them highly beneficial. They require us to actually do the work of identifying the issues and writing up what happened and why. I realize that having a customer contract to do this shouldn't be a requirement but human psychology is funny thing. I can turn to my pm and say "I have to do this it's part of the contract" and they immediately back off. I agree…

Post by mathattack » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 2:08 PM UTC

Post by qaq » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 2:14 PM UTC

babo wrote: post #25

qaq wrote: post #23

This is "not that different" from getting a very high load spike do you guys not have some autoscaling setup?

Autoscaling as not necessary driven by CPU load.

Post by zzzcpan » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

merb wrote: post #32

dogma1138 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the OP didn't mean that these post mortems are not beneficial internally, what he said that disclosing all these details to the public can be confusing and maybe counter productive.

I'm not sure whats better. 1. Describing the root cause and what you failed at. 2. Blame the stuff you are using / other people (clouds you use) 3. just says nothing and try to forget what happened. What do you think is best?

Post by themartorana » Sat, Sep 10, 2016, 2:27 PM UTC

merb wrote: post #32

dogma1138 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the OP didn't mean that these post mortems are not beneficial internally, what he said that disclosing all these details to the public can be confusing and maybe counter productive.

I'm not sure whats better. 1. Describing the root cause and what you failed at. 2. Blame the stuff you are using / other people (clouds you use) 3. just says nothing and try to forget what happened. What do you think is best?