Quick! Grab all the evidence: Capturing application state for post-incident forensics.

In this blog post, the author draws a parallel between detective stories and the challenges faced by developers and operations engineers in diagnosing and resolving technical issues in critical applications. The struggle to quickly restore service while preserving crucial forensic evidence is akin to solving a mystery, where rushing to conclusions might eliminate key clues. Despite the use of sophisticated observability tools, engineers often need more granular data, such as heap dumps and stack traces, to identify the true root cause of incidents. The proliferation of containerized applications has intensified this challenge, as microservices allow for rapid service restoration but limit debugging utilities. PagerDuty's Operations Cloud offers a solution by enabling immediate evidence capture and service restoration through instantly triggered runbooks, reducing both mean time to recovery (MTTR) and time spent on troubleshooting. The blog series will continue with a focus on leveraging Kubernetes Ephemeral Containers for evidence capture.