D&D is a concept briefly discussed in the “SRE book.” A number of engineering teams use this technique to prepare team members for going on-call. The idea is to re-investigate a recent on-call incident with the team. The team tells the dungeon master what they would do or query to understand or solve the problem, and the dungeon master tells the team what happens with each action or observation.

In this highly interactive session, I will be acting as Dungeon master as we role-play some real-life issues. We will have a few scenarios in which something is not working properly and volunteers from the audience will go through a series of questions/steps to isolate those problems. We will see how the D&D exercise can provide more context of the infrastructure to the volunteers. These issues will be fairly common, but the process of going through debugging these issues as a team is fun and a great learning exercise. The key takeaway for audience is how to hold a similar session for their team and gain more confidence on going on-call.