Know Every Way Your System Can Fail

A structured architecture review that surfaces hidden failure modes, maps single points of failure, and produces a ranked remediation roadmap — before your users discover the gaps.

Duration: 3 days Team: 1 Senior Chaos Engineer

You might be experiencing...

You don't know which components are single points of failure until production goes down
Monitoring covers happy paths but misses failure propagation chains
Recovery procedures exist on paper but have never been tested under pressure
Compliance auditors ask about resilience posture and you have no quantified answer

A resilience assessment is the essential first step before any chaos engineering programme. Without a structured map of your failure modes, chaos experiments are guesswork — you may test the wrong things while genuine single points of failure remain invisible. Our assessment applies a proven failure taxonomy across every layer of your stack: compute, networking, data, dependencies, and operational processes.

We combine architecture review with monitoring gap analysis to answer the question your on-call engineers already know to ask: “what would we miss if X failed at 2am?” The output is a ranked SPOF map and remediation roadmap that engineering leads can take directly into sprint planning. Every finding is linked to a specific chaos experiment, so the assessment feeds directly into a Chaos Engineering Sprint if you choose to continue.

Most teams discover two to four times more failure modes than they expected. That is not a failure of your engineering — it is the nature of distributed systems. The goal is to surface those modes in a structured review, not in a production incident.

Engagement Phases

Day 1

Architecture Ingestion

We review your architecture diagrams, runbooks, incident history, and monitoring configuration. We map all service dependencies, data flows, and external integrations to build a complete failure-mode inventory.

Day 2

SPOF Analysis & Gap Assessment

We apply a custom failure taxonomy to score each component on blast radius, likelihood, and detection coverage. We cross-reference monitoring alerts against failure scenarios to identify blind spots.

Day 3

Findings & Roadmap Delivery

We present ranked findings with severity scores, estimated MTTR impact, and a phased remediation roadmap. Each finding links to a specific chaos experiment we recommend to validate the fix.

Deliverables

Failure mode inventory with severity and blast-radius scoring
Single point of failure map with dependency graph
Monitoring coverage gap report (what fails invisibly)
Prioritised remediation roadmap with effort estimates
Recommended chaos experiment backlog (input for Sprint)

Before & After

MetricBeforeAfter
SPOFs identified2 known15 mapped
Monitoring coverage40%92% gap-closed roadmap
Recovery procedures documented20%100% with owners

Tools We Use

Custom failure taxonomy Prometheus / Grafana Architecture diagramming

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need production access to run the assessment?

No. The Resilience Assessment is a document-and-interview review. We work from architecture diagrams, runbooks, monitoring dashboards, and a 90-minute technical interview with your engineering leads. Read-only access to monitoring is helpful but not required.

How is this different from a general architecture review?

We focus exclusively on failure modes — not scalability, cost, or feature design. Every finding is mapped to a specific failure scenario with a blast-radius estimate and a recommended chaos experiment to validate the fix. The output is an actionable chaos backlog, not a generic best-practices list.

What if we have very little documentation?

That is common and is itself a finding. We reconstruct the architecture through interviews and by reviewing code, infrastructure-as-code, and monitoring configs. Lack of documentation typically surfaces 30–50% more failure modes than reviewed from docs alone.

Know Your Blast Radius

Book a free 30-minute resilience scope call with our chaos engineers. We review your architecture, identify your highest-risk failure modes, and recommend the experiments that will give you the most signal.

Talk to an Expert