Why Run Exercises#

Runbooks that have never been tested are fiction. Failover procedures that have never been executed are hopes. Game days and tabletop exercises convert assumptions about system resilience into verified facts – or reveal that those assumptions were wrong before a real incident does.

The value is not just finding technical gaps. Exercises expose process gaps: unclear escalation paths, missing permissions, outdated contact lists, communication breakdowns between teams. These are invisible until a simulated failure forces people to actually follow the documented procedure.

Why Break Things on Purpose#

Production systems fail in ways that testing environments never reveal. A database connection pool exhaustion under load, a cascading timeout across three services, a DNS cache that masks a routing change until it expires – these failures only surface when real conditions collide in ways nobody predicted. Chaos engineering is the discipline of deliberately injecting failures into a system to discover weaknesses before they cause outages.