incident command academy · sre / platform
Stay calm at 3 a.m.
A 4-week cohort for engineers who carry the pager.
A 4-week cohort with a live game-day. You'll command a simulated outage, coordinate responders, communicate to stakeholders and write the postmortem.
- Level
- Advanced
- Length
- 4-week cohort + live drills · 5 modules
- Topics
- 16in 5 lessons
- [31 min]Briefing — Course kickoff, Rules of engagement
- [1 h 25 min]Signals — Anatomy of an alert, SLOs and error budgets, Talk: "Alert fatigue is a bug"
- [57 min]Command — Taking command, Radio discipline, Who does what?, Incident runbook template
- [2 h 45 min]Game day — Outage simulator, Severity levels, Live drill, Comms check
- [2 h 45 min]After — Blameless postmortems, Postmortem assignment, Reading list
- [LIVE]Postmortem teardown — live
From the course program: modules, their topics and length, then the next live session.
4-week blueprint
Curriculum as a production pipeline
Five modules with real artefacts: runbooks, a branching scenario, an outage simulator, a live drill and a reviewed postmortem.
5 lessons · 16 topics · about 8 h of material
- MOD 0031 min
Briefing
Cohort welcome, schedule, grading and the rules everyone follows on the bridge.
VideoReading
- MOD 011 h 25 min
Signals
Read dashboards like an IC and alert on what users feel.
ImageReadingEmbed
- MOD 0257 min
Command
Take command, keep the bridge disciplined and decide under pressure.
VideoAudioInteractivePDF
- MOD 032 h 45 min
Game day
Command a simulated cascading failure, run the live drill and check your comms.
SimulationInteractiveTracked activityQuiz
- MOD 042 h 45 min
After
Turn the outage into learning: blameless postmortem, review, reading.
ReadingProject
the chaos drill arena
Game day: you run the bridge
You do not learn command by watching slides. In week 3 you take command of a simulated cascading failure, then run a tracked drill in a sandbox cluster.
Outage simulator
A packaged simulation with a timeline and a chat pane. Decide, delegate, communicate.
Live drill
A tracked activity in the sandbox cluster; your actions are recorded for the debrief.
Comms check
A quiz with every question type, from severity matching to error-budget maths.
Postmortem assignment
Write the postmortem for the game-day outage, reviewed by a tutor and a peer.
instructors
Taught by people who carry the pager
Priya Raman
Staff SRE
Leads incident response for payment infrastructure and designs the course's drills.
Marek Lis
Incident commander, fintech
Runs the bridge on major incidents and reviews every postmortem in the course.
retrospective log
From engineering leads
- [review]
"[03:12] first page of my rotation. [03:14] roles assigned. [03:41] mitigated. I had never felt that calm."
— Head of Platform, logistics scale-up - [review]
"Our postmortems went from blame threads to action items with owners."
— Engineering Manager, payments - [review]
"The game day is the closest thing to a real SEV1 without losing money."
— Staff Engineer, e-commerce
live sessions
Teardowns and game days
Live webinar
Postmortem teardown — live
· 18:00 CET
Live teardown of a public postmortem with Marek Lis.
In person
Game day in Warsaw
· 09:00
Warsaw, Koszyki Hall, ul. Koszykowa 63
Full-day in-person incident drill for teams.
enrolment plans
Seats, teams and reviews
Prices from the academy's catalogue. In this demo every module is open.
Course
On-Call — Incident Command (1 seat)
€398.37one-off
One seat in the November cohort: 4 weeks, live game day, reviewed postmortem, certificate.
- On-Call — Incident Command for Platform Engineers
- Recommended
Subscription
On-Call for Teams (annual)
€3,170.73per year
Up to 10 seats per year across cohorts, a private game day for your team and a quarterly on-call review.
- On-Call — Incident Command for Platform Engineers
Course
On-call review 1:1 (45 min)
€121.95one-off
One 45-minute review of your alerts, rotation or postmortem.
- On-call review 1:1
faq
Frequently asked
How long is the cohort?
Four weeks: briefing and signals, command, the live game day, and the postmortem.
Do I need my own cluster?
No. The simulator runs in the browser and the drill runs in a sandbox cluster provided by the course.
Is there a certificate?
Yes: Incident Commander — Level 1, after the comms check and the reviewed postmortem.
Can my company pay?
Yes. There is a team subscription and companies can use voucher codes.