Trace Against Time

Round
1
Time Remaining
60
Score
0
Business Impact

Tools

Welcome to Trace Against Time

A critical outage is affecting the system. Use your observability tools to find the root cause before business impact becomes critical.

Choose Your Role:

Final Score: 0

That was a tough one. Real-world outages are even more complex. Ready to master the tools that can prevent this? Explore Red Hat's observability capabilities.

Trace Against Time

How to Play

Objective

Find and fix the root cause of the system outage for each round. Score as many points as you can before the Business Impact meter fills up.

Time & Actions

Each round, you have a limited budget of Investigation Time. Each tool you use costs time. If you run out of time, you can wait for the next shift, but this will increase Business Impact!

Gameplay

  1. Observe Symptoms: At the start of a round, some services will show symptoms (yellow). Beware of red herrings—symptoms that aren't related to the real problem!
  2. Use Tools: Click a tool, then click a service node.
    • Metrics: Reveal health numbers and a performance graph. Good for quick scans.
    • Logs: View detailed error messages, often pointing to a connected service.
    • Traces: Show the exact path of a request, giving a clear clue to the failure point.
    • Business (VP Only): Correlate the outage to financial impact.
  3. Remediate: Once you're confident you've found the root cause, select the node and click "Remediate". A correct guess scores points. A wrong guess significantly raises Business Impact!

Created by Dan Bettinger and Gemini