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Field notes from the on-call

Engineering deep-dives, incident retros and observability practice from the Helix team.

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Topics All posts 241 Engineering Incident retros Product Tutorials Practice Culture
All articles // 61 posts · newest first
12 Feb
INCIDENT

The Slack Thread That Saved an Incident: Async On-Call Done Right

Nobody joined the call. The whole incident got resolved in a thread, across three time zones, and it was our fastest response of...

Marco Vidal Feb 12 2026 3 min
09 Feb
FIELD NOTES FROM THE ON-CALL

Cardinality budgets: a practical guide to label hygiene

Every label you add multiplies your time series. A cardinality budget turns that runaway multiplication into a number a team can...

Priya Raman Feb 9 2026 2 min
05 Feb
INCIDENT

Debugging a Retry Storm at 2am With Half My Brain Asleep

Request volume tripled in ninety seconds with no traffic change upstream. That shape only means one thing: the system is...

Marco Vidal Feb 5 2026 3 min
29 Jan
INCIDENT

Carrying the Pager During a Hurricane: Lessons in Redundancy

My power went out mid-incident. The pager didn't care about my hurricane; it still expected an acknowledgment in ninety seconds.

Lena Park Jan 29 2026 3 min
22 Jan
INCIDENT

The Pager That Never Should Have Fired: A False-Positive Autopsy

We paged three engineers at 4am for a threshold that was correct in every way except that it should never have existed.

Priya Raman Jan 22 2026 3 min
15 Jan
INCIDENT

What I Learned Running My First Incident as Commander

Eleven minutes into my first incident as commander I realized nobody was going to tell me what to do next. That was the point.

Marco Vidal Jan 15 2026 3 min
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