Make your first outage a rehearsal.
For most engineers, the first real incident is the training: 2 a.m., customers waiting, nobody to ask. SkillSpire lets your team practise outages first, in a safe copy of production with real logs, real dashboards and a game master, then debrief without blame.
The Wheel of Misfortune is a practice from site reliability engineering: a team spins up a past incident and works through it together, with someone playing the system. We built a product around it.
A playable drill
The checkout that got slow.
You’re on call. Pick what to do next. Every action costs simulated minutes, some help, some don’t. Asking the game master is always free.
What do you do?
What you’ve found
AUTO DEMO · Click an action to take control
Nothing yet. Most people start by looking. Some start by acting. Both are fine here.
Safe to be wrong
Practice only works if nobody’s watching the wrong answers.
Hints are free.
Asking for help is what good engineers do on call. There’s no penalty for it here, ever, and no score to protect by staying quiet.
No stopwatch on your typing.
We don’t measure keystrokes or reading speed. The clock in a drill is the incident’s clock, not yours.
Debriefs are blameless.
The same rules as your real postmortems: what happened, what helped, what to try next time. Never who got it wrong.
Managers see practice, not scores.
Who has rehearsed which kinds of incident. Not their wrong turns, hints or times, and nothing goes on an HR profile.
Your postmortems
Your past incidents are your best curriculum.
Every postmortem your team has written is a drill waiting to happen. SkillSpire turns the timeline into clues, the root cause into the hidden answer, and the lessons into debrief prompts. A senior engineer reviews it before anyone plays.
Generic scenarios are a start. Your own outages, on your own architecture, are what make the next one shorter.
Postmortem: slow checkout, March
Drill: the checkout that got slow
For engineering managers
Know your rota is ready, without grading the people on it.
You need to know whether the team can handle a database incident at 2 a.m. You don’t need to know who asked for three hints to get there.
What you see
- Who on the rota has practised which kinds of incident
- Gaps across the team, such as “nobody has drilled a certificate expiry”
- Drills run per month, solo or with a game master
- Completions sent to your learning system, if you want them there
What you never see
- Hints used, wrong turns taken or time spent
- Any ranking, percentile or “top 5%”
- Typing speed, keystrokes or screen activity
- Anything posted to an HR or promotion profile
Completions can be sent to learning systems using xAPI, the standard published by the IEEE as 9274.1.1-2023. What’s sent is the record of practice, nothing more.
Send us one postmortem. Run the drill on Friday.
Pick an incident your team still talks about. We’ll turn it into a drill, a senior engineer on your side checks it, and your newest on-call engineer gets to meet it in rehearsal first.
SkillSpire is a fictional brand. This address goes nowhere.