Government / Regulated
Downtime Reduction Program
Reliability modernization and observability overhaul for a regulated environment that materially reduced unplanned outages.
Context
A public-sector technology team operated legacy service stacks with recurring after-hours incidents and inconsistent recovery procedures.
Problem
Unplanned outages were rising, alert noise was high, and incident triage depended too heavily on tribal knowledge.
Approach
We implemented a phased reliability program: service hardening, monitoring standards, runbook redesign, and weekly operational reviews tied to incident metrics.
Architecture
- Segmented workload tiers for core services and supporting jobs
- Standardized container runtime profiles and health checks
- Unified metrics, logs, and trace ingestion with policy-aware retention
- Alert routing based on service criticality and operating hours
Architecture Diagram Placeholder
Results and Metrics
- 65% reduction in unplanned downtime over two quarters
- Mean time to recovery improved from 74 minutes to 26 minutes
- Critical alert false positives reduced by 48%
Tools and Stack
Docker, Prometheus, Grafana, centralized logging, Ansible hardening playbooks, and SIEM forwarding.
Lessons Learned
Reliability does not improve from tooling alone; teams need clear ownership boundaries, practical runbooks, and disciplined review loops.