“I think it was useful having the Grafana dashboards. The Slack integration was really cool. That felt really realistic, similar to how we do our jobs. Getting that hands-on experience with those conversations — that thought process of, alright, let’s look at recent deployments. Let’s look at this and stuff like that. That’s something that you can’t do until there’s an actual incident.”

“It was great to see it live. I think the Slack integration is powerful. I think that’s the real secret sauce. You can do graphs and you can do other pieces. The bit that is hard to recreate with engineers that you really need to get around, is actually a meaningful conversation. That’s something you guys are doing really, really well.”

“I had an excellent experience with Uptime Labs. As a fresher with very less exposure to corporate culture and tools, Uptime Labs gave me a hands-on and real-time mock platform where I learnt replicating the issue, asking valid questions, troubleshooting, resolving and on-time escalation wherever required, plus improved my communication and pressure management during business critical issues.”

“I’m genuinely impressed by what I’ve just seen. It looks like a must-have. War games are hard. It’s like having a framework, which allows that to kind of 10x it — because a lot of effort would go into organising those things and coordinating with people and getting time in the calendar, and then the wash-up. And being able to have this stuff as a turn-key capability that people can do in their own time, they’ve got all the data to back up all that analysis, then for the wash-up afterwards. It’s fantastic. And as someone who’s just played the game, it really did feel very, very authentic.

Having experienced it, it sounds like it’s definitely a solution to a widespread problem. A lot of organisations will think it’s genuinely a value add. And it’s unique. You know, it’s that’s what great products do — they solve problems that nothing else can.”

“I think it’s really good. In fact, I’m almost thinking to myself that if I was to recruit an incident manager, I would want to pay you guys to do a half-hour scenario with them like this. I do recruit incident managers, and you only get to understand how good they are when you have a live incident. This is really good.”

“I have been involved in incident response improvement for over 3 years and can confirm that it’s extremely challenging to streamline the workflow in the process. My team has tried multiple tools available in the market and in fact, we have constantly been experimenting with several POC’s but there is very less clarity on quantifiable improvements these tools can add to our existing capabilities.

Uptime Labs seems to have cracked this problem with their unique solution. Their simulated environment to prepare individuals for potential accidents/incidents brings a massive value-add to the Incident Response Management Lifecycle. Preparing your team for an incident is a costly & cumbersome affair and Uptime Labs targets both these parameters effectively. If you are a company/product worried about uptime, this tool is a must-have and a valuable addition to your operations arsenal of tools.

“It feels like you are actually driving a priority-one incident in which people are chasing you, wanting an update, who is doing what, etc. So if you are to use this, it gives you very good exposure to process.”

"OANDA provides access for retail clients to trade the financial markets, along with live currency exchange rate data feeds for businesses. In our industry, even seconds of downtime could result in a huge impact for clients, our reputation and the standing we have with regulators around the globe. Of course, in order to stay competitive we need to continually update our platform, and no matter how many controls are put in place it’s inherently risky. Incidents happen, and improving our mean time to recovery is essential.

I love how Uptime Labs provides an engaging way to hone the craft of effectively participating in an incident. As teams get better at preventing incidents from happening in the first place, there is a side effect that fewer people have recent experience of how to act when they do. This can really impact the communication and alignment of responsibilities within the team, slowing down the recovery. Playbooks and tooling are essential, but nothing really prepares you for being in that moment of high stress when time is critical. Uptime Labs helps bridge that gap."

“The game tells me where I’m going wrong. You didn’t even have to tell me that this is the feedback because when you finish it, you realise that okay, this is where I’m going wrong and need to improve. Instead of running to fix the issue, which will take some time, you instead take a moment to try to understand the problem. I totally enjoyed it.”