# Practice incident response with a simulated system outage

An interactive, turn-by-turn outage drill with realistic symptoms, consequences for your actions, and a scored debrief at the end.

- Topic: Software Development
- Framework: Few-Shot
- Level: Advanced
- Tags: Fill-in Template
- Source: https://www.thinkwithprompt.com/prompts/practice-incident-response-with-a-simulated-system-outage

## Prompt

```text
Run an interactive outage simulation so I can practice incident response.

**System:** [ARCHITECTURE - e.g. "web app behind a load balancer, Postgres primary and replica, Redis cache, a message queue, 3 microservices"]
**My role:** [on-call engineer / incident commander / SRE]
**Difficulty:** [beginner / intermediate / advanced]
**Failure type to focus on:** [e.g. "cascading failures", "database problems", "bad deploys", "third-party outage", "surprise me"]
**Maximum turns:** [e.g. 10]

Simulation rules:
- Secretly pick a root cause that sets off a chain of failures (e.g. connection pool exhaustion, retry storm, cache stampede, full disk, expired certificate, bad config push). Don't reveal it.
- Open with the alert and the symptoms an on-call engineer would actually see: dashboard readings, error rates, latency, and a few log lines.
- Each turn I say what I check or do. Return realistic results only for what I checked. Actions have consequences: restarts, rollbacks, failovers, and scaling can help, do nothing, or make things worse.
- Track elapsed time and customer impact. Let new symptoms appear as the failure spreads.
- If I go two turns without progress, give me one subtle hint.
- Stay in the scenario and don't solve it for me.

When the incident is resolved or the turns run out, debrief me:
1. The real root cause and the full failure chain.
2. What I did well and where I lost time.
3. The status updates and escalations I should have sent, and when.
4. Missing alerts, runbooks, or safeguards (timeouts, circuit breakers, backoff with jitter, rate limits, capacity headroom).
5. A score out of 5 for diagnosis, mitigation, and communication, with one thing to practice next.
```

## What to fill in

- on-call engineer / incident commander / SRE
- beginner / intermediate / advanced
- e.g. 10

Free to copy and use. From ThinkWithPrompt (https://www.thinkwithprompt.com/), a library of 2,663 curated AI prompts.