I personally don’t like the term “War Room” when describing a firefighting situation that many software companies have to deal with when systems go down or have problems. The way these war rooms typically play out is that key personnel (engineers, operations, business) are summoned into a room until the problem is solved. This was the case back with the Apollo 13 mission and still is now when we look at the famous Facebook war room from Dec 2012.
What’s the problem with these pictures? There are a lot of people in the room that have no clue whether the problem on hand is actually something they can fix or are responsible for. All of these people are summoned without first figuring out which people should look at the problem. Why is that? Because the collected “evidence” in the form of infrastructure monitoring data, log files, user complaints, etc., just shows symptoms but doesn’t tell us anything about the actual impact and root cause of issues.