CMOC Practice Events

Provides overview of Support Engineering CMOC quarterly practice events and how to run them

CMOC Practice Events

Support Engineering aims to conduct practice CMOC incident events globally every quarter. The exact date & time of each event (1 per region) will not be known to the CMOC ahead of time. This is to simulate the nature of live events being unexpected.

Purpose

The practice events provide an opportunity to practice the activities and processes related to the CMOC responsibility. They are not a test that can be passed or failed, but rather a team exercise to gain experience, and an opportunity to iterate on the process and documentation.

Outcomes

  • Familiarity with tools like Status.io so that in a real emergency they’re not a blocker to communication
  • Increased familiarity with the CMOC process and confidence in a live event
  • Familiarity with the incident room, Slack #incident-management channel and how communication is formalized between Incident Manager, EOC and CMOC during the course of an incident
  • An opportunity to retrospect and get live feedback from a friendly audience

Participants

  • a manager or senior support engineer will fulfill the role of the Incident Manager (and EOC if appropriate) and facilitate the practice event and scenario
  • a note taker (another manager or senior engineer) will take notes of any learnings, improvements or gaps in documentation or process identified during the event
  • the rostered CMOC will participate as though it were a live incident (but without the pressure of an actual incident or busy incident room!)

Practice event tools, artefacts, references

How to: Create and coordinate a quarterly practice event

Assumption: a DRI has been assigned to act as the coordinator for the quarter. The following needs to be completed (or delegated for completion) by the coordinator:

  • Start by creating a new practice event issue from the template

The template includes instructions of other artefacts to create and how to schedule the events.

Last modified June 27, 2024: Fix various vale errors (46417d02)