What I'm learning while building an evidence-to-action workflow
I've been researching a simple question:
What happens between detecting an operational problem and actually knowing what to do next?
The more conversations I have with incident managers, SREs, platform engineers, product leaders, and technical project managers, the less I think the problem is simply "not enough alerts."
Organizations already have plenty of signals.
The harder part is connecting those signals into something people can understand and act on.
So I'm experimenting with a workflow around:
Signal → Context → Evidence → Ownership → Action
The idea is simple.
- Signal
Something happens.
For example:
«Payment service latency increases.»
- Context
What else is connected to the signal?
- Which service is affected?
- What dependencies are involved?
- What changed recently?
- What is the impact?
- Evidence
Instead of immediately making a conclusion, bring the relevant evidence together.
For example:
- Service catalog → Team A
- Current on-call → Team A
- Recent deployment → Team B
- Recent repository activity → Team B
Now the system has a problem:
The evidence doesn't completely agree.
- Ownership
Rather than automatically declaring:
«"Team B owns it."»
the experiment exposes the uncertainty.
Ownership confidence: AMBIGUOUS
The goal is to make the evidence visible before someone acts on an assumption.
- Action
Once the relevant people and context are clear, the system can help identify a reasonable next step.
Not:
«"Automation has decided what you should do."»
But more like:
«"Here is what we know, here is where the evidence conflicts, here is who appears relevant, and here is a possible next step."»
What I'm learning
My earlier thinking focused heavily on ownership.
The research has made the problem more nuanced.
Sometimes the owner is documented.
Sometimes the owner is known.
But teams can still spend time reconstructing what happened, reconciling different signals, confirming responsibility, and deciding what evidence is trustworthy enough to act on.
That has pushed me toward evidence before automation.
I'm not trying to build another monitoring system.
I'm not trying to replace ServiceNow, observability, incident-management or existing systems of record.
And I'm deliberately not trying to build an AI that blindly decides who is responsible.
I'm testing whether connecting the right evidence and making uncertainty explicit can reduce some of the reconstruction work that happens before coordinated action.
The experiment is still being built, so none of this is validated yet.
The question I'm most interested in now is:
Does this remove work from an existing incident workflow — or does it simply create another workflow people have to maintain?
That's the part I want to find out.
If you're building infrastructure, developer tools, SRE tooling, or internal platforms, I'd be interested in how you'd approach this.
The explicit “Ownership confidence: AMBIGUOUS” step feels especially valuable—surfacing conflicting evidence seems safer than forcing a confident assignment. I also like that you’re testing whether this removes reconstruction work instead of assuming another layer of automation is automatically helpful. Have your interviews surfaced a lightweight way to measure that time saved?
The “evidence before automation” approach makes a lot of sense. Especially the part about exposing conflicting signals instead of forcing the system to choose an answer. That seems important for building trust with engineering teams.
Really like the framing of evidence → action. We’re seeing a similar challenge while building for AI agents — generating more signals or eval results is relatively easy, but making them reproducible and actionable for engineering teams is where the real value starts to show up. Would be interesting to follow how your workflow evolves as you get more real-world usage.
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
I like the “evidence before automation” idea. How are you thinking about measuring whether it actually saves teams time?
One stage that bit me an hour ago: the evidence can lag the action.
I made a change, checked it from outside, got the old state back, and nearly reverted something that had worked fine. The read came from a cache with a five minute life. Nothing disagreed and nothing errored, the check just wasn't answering about now.
Worth stamping every piece of evidence with when it was true rather than when you fetched it. Freshness is the field people skip and then argue over.
The "Evidence doesn't completely agree" stage is where most incident response tools fall over in my experience. Humans are actually good at reconciling conflicting signals, but they need the disagreement surfaced honestly instead of getting a flattened answer. One thing I'd watch: once you connect ownership into the same flow, teams can start treating suggested owners as blame assignments, which changes how honestly evidence gets entered. Keeping ownership as a tentative suggestion, rather than a conclusion, probably matters a lot for trust. Following this — the Signal to Context jump alone is a genuinely hard problem.
The evidence can disagree part is really important. I've seen systems jump from "we found this signal" straight to "this must be the cause" and then everything after that is built on the assumption. Keeping the conflict visible is probably more useful than pretending the system knows more than it does.
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
This is useful. How are you finding your first users so far?
Interesting. How are you measuring whether it is working?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Interesting. How are you measuring whether it is working?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
Interesting. How are you measuring whether it is working?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
This is useful. How are you finding your first users so far?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
Interesting take. Would you still recommend this approach to someone starting today?
Good write-up. What would you do differently if you started again?
Thanks for writing this up. Bookmarking it for later.
Love this angle, honestly. What made you look into it in the first place?
In your conversations so far, have teams identified a concrete incident step that this evidence layer would replace, or is the value still mostly conceptual?
That's exactly what I'm trying to validate.
So far, the research has identified recurring friction around ownership, context reconstruction, evidence reconciliation, and coordination. But I haven't yet validated that an evidence layer actually replaces a concrete incident step.
That's the next experiment I'm building toward: whether it can reduce the work between the initial signal and the first correct coordinated action, without creating another workflow teams have to maintain.
The Signal → Context → Evidence → Ownership → Action chain makes the “does this remove work?” question testable. I’d start with one incident archetype and baseline time-to-first-correct-action, number of handoffs/reassignments, and how often someone has to ask for the same evidence twice. For ambiguous ownership, I’d avoid forcing a winner: show the top two candidates, the conflicting fields, and the one missing piece that would resolve it, then measure how often a human confirms it without opening another coordination loop. Evidence also needs a freshness/authority rule — a current service catalog and a recent deployment should not silently count the same as a stale spreadsheet. A shadow-mode pilot on existing incidents could show whether the workflow reduces reconstruction time before it becomes another system teams must maintain.
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?