You can’t improve what you never test.
An SRE Game Day is a controlled failure simulation – a safe environment where teams practice how systems and people respond to incidents before they happen in production.
1. Purpose of an SRE Game Day
- Validate incident response readiness.
- Measure recovery time (MTTR) and alert efficiency.
- Train new engineers in real outage conditions without real downtime.
2. Setting Up the Environment
- Always run in staging or isolated sandboxes.
- Use chaos engineering tools like LitmusChaos, Gremlin, or Chaos Mesh.
- Define clear success metrics: SLA/SLO compliance after simulated failure.
Example simulation:
litmusctl create chaos --type=pod-delete --app=checkout-service
3. Simulate Common Failure Scenarios
- Pod crash loops → app restarts.
- Node unavailability → rescheduling validation.
- API latency spikes → network degradation tests.
- Database unreachability → failover validation.
4. Observe, Measure & Correlate
- Use Prometheus + Grafana for time-series metrics.
- Loki/FluentBit for log aggregation.
- Tempo/Jaeger for distributed tracing.
- Integrate with KubeHA AI to correlate logs, metrics, and events in real-time.
5. Debrief & Document
- Post-game blameless postmortem – identify gaps in:
- Alert noise reduction
- Runbook accuracy
- Communication protocols
- Feed findings into automated playbooks and incident response scripts.
6. Automate Game Days
- Schedule recurring tests via CI/CD.
- Use Argo Workflows or GitHub Actions to trigger chaos scenarios automatically.
- Record outcomes to KubeHA analytics for continuous resilience scoring.
Example:
- name: Chaos Test
run: litmusctl create chaos --type=node-shutdown --app=backend
Bottom Line:
SRE Game Days turn theoretical reliability into measurable practice.
They reveal blind spots before production does.
With KubeHA AI + Chaos automation, your team builds confidence, not chaos.
Follow KubeHA for Game Day templates, chaos workflows, and automated RCA integrations.
Experience KubeHA today: www.KubeHA.com
KubeHA’s introduction, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyzTQPLGaD0