Most IT support operations we assess assume their problems are specific to their environments. The first half of the list almost never is. Here’s what we see and solve most often.
Disclosure, I work on operatex.dev, an incident agent.
The correlation ordering is the part most teams get backwards, jumping straight to clever rules before establishing the baseline of how many events actually needed a human means you can't prove the fix worked, you're just guessing it did. And the runbook point about a wrong runbook costing more than a missing one is underrated, stale documentation doesn't just fail to help, it actively burns fifteen minutes of an engineer's trust before they give up and start from scratch.
Disclosure, I work on operatex.dev, an incident agent.
The correlation ordering is the part most teams get backwards, jumping straight to clever rules before establishing the baseline of how many events actually needed a human means you can't prove the fix worked, you're just guessing it did. And the runbook point about a wrong runbook costing more than a missing one is underrated, stale documentation doesn't just fail to help, it actively burns fifteen minutes of an engineer's trust before they give up and start from scratch.