Breakathon: Case of the P1 Incident
by Amanda Gonser
September 3, 2019
| 3 min read
Grab your magnifying glass and pipe: We have an incident—and we need your help to solve it!
The sky is dark, and the rain pitter-pattering on the roof is lulling you to sleep. Just as you start to drift off, a bolt of light and a loud noise startle you awake. You’re being paged.
You grab your phone and head to the living room with your laptop. The screen, too bright for the dark room flashes:
You open your computer, put on your Sherlock Holmes hat, and get to work.
Breakathon at Summit 2019
PagerDuty is inviting you to a similar scene—but with less-middle-of-the night stress, and with more fun (food and drink included). We can tell you that an incident will occur on September 23 from 4:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. And your super-sleuth skills are requested.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to solve all levels of the failure scenarios in our Breakathon.
Sounds Interesting. What’s a Breakathon?
Breakathon is like a hackathon—but to win, competitors need to find and fix the “breaks”. Breaks will start simple and become more complex as you go. Join other Sherlocks and Nancy Drews as you work together in teams to debug issues and resolve real incidents for prizes—the winning team can pick between a Nintendo Switch OR an Apple iPad.
But don’t worry, you’re not starting off with no help. Here are some key clues to help you get started:
The Breakathon will occur September 23 from 4:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.- It’s a free event; all you need to do is RSVP to reserve a seat.
- There will be tons of awesome prizes.
- You will be well supplied with food and drinks while solving this incident.
- This is a P1 incident and we need you there!
We would love to have you on our team at Breakathon and encourage you to invite your teammates and friends. You can sign up as a team or come alone and get paired with other gumshoes.
Anyone currently managing a production web application (including, but not limited to, people in SRE or Ops roles) will make great a Breakathon detective. And if you want to level up your operational chops, this is a great way to do that too!
What to Pack in Your Detective Satchel
As you prepare yourself for some serious incident resolving, we ask that you:
- Bring a laptop capable of SSH’ing and loading a webpage
- Bring your laptop power adapter
- Be ready to use your GitHub account. If you don’t have one, you can set up a free account.
