DEV Community

Tom Harada
Tom Harada

Posted on • Edited on

1

Operational Excellence Tip #1

I like to call this technique "Top Errors Zero." Like Inbox Zero, it works by focusing on root causing and fixing your service or app's top errors and removing them.

First you have to record them (and potentially you need to group them if they have customer-specific information/ids). Once recorded, you need to surface them in a dashboard. E.g., create a table of "Top errors" sorted in descending count. Optionally you can include a time chart with when these errors are occurring. And this is as simple as grouping all API calls by error message.

Operational Excellence Tip #1 is: review this table regularly (e.g., weekly) and drive these errors to zero (e.g., as part of your on-call or ops work).

This doesn't cover bad UX or situations where you aren't raising errors in the right place. But in general you'll be surprised how much quality improves for your customers by driving down top errors to zero.

Update. Also use Pareto charts to bucket the top errors or issues to investigate.

Hostinger image

Get n8n VPS hosting 3x cheaper than a cloud solution

Get fast, easy, secure n8n VPS hosting from $4.99/mo at Hostinger. Automate any workflow using a pre-installed n8n application and no-code customization.

Start now

Top comments (0)

AWS Q Developer image

Your AI Code Assistant

Automate your code reviews. Catch bugs before your coworkers. Fix security issues in your code. Built to handle large projects, Amazon Q Developer works alongside you from idea to production code.

Get started free in your IDE

👋 Kindness is contagious

Please leave a ❤️ or a friendly comment on this post if you found it helpful!

Okay