Solved: How do you use Notion?

#devops #programming #tutorial #cloud

🚀 Executive Summary

TL;DR: Notion’s inherent flexibility often creates a ‘blank canvas’ paradox, leading to disorganized ‘digital junk drawers’ in DevOps workflows. The solution involves imposing robust, scalable systems through structured, interconnected databases for knowledge management, project tracking, and infrastructure orchestration, transforming Notion into a powerful low-code platform.

🎯 Key Takeaways

Notion’s relational databases enable the creation of a ‘Single Source of Truth’ for runbooks and post-mortems, linking them directly to services for dynamic knowledge management.
Teams can use Notion as a lightweight project management tool by linking ‘Tasks’ to ‘Sprints’ and embedding technical documentation, providing seamless context switching for focused projects.
Notion serves as an ‘Infrastructure Asset Catalog’ for metadata and ownership, and an ‘Onboarding Orchestrator’ using templates, standardizing processes while strictly avoiding the storage of sensitive data.

Struggling with Notion’s flexibility in your DevOps workflow? This guide provides three structured, actionable strategies for transforming Notion from a blank canvas into a powerful tool for knowledge management, project tracking, and infrastructure orchestration.

The Symptom: The “Blank Canvas” Paradox in DevOps

You’ve heard the hype. Notion is the “all-in-one workspace” that can replace everything from Confluence to Jira to Google Docs. Your team dives in, full of optimism. A few weeks later, the reality sets in: your Notion workspace is a digital junk drawer. Runbooks are scattered, project plans are inconsistent, and finding critical information during an outage feels like a scavenger hunt. This is the “blank canvas” paradox—a tool so flexible that it encourages chaos without a deliberate system.

The question “How do you use Notion?” isn’t about learning the features like slash commands or databases. For a technical team, it’s about architecture. It’s about imposing a robust, scalable system on top of that flexibility. Let’s move beyond random pages and build an operational backbone for your team.

Solution 1: The Single Source of Truth for Runbooks and Post-Mortems

The most immediate and high-impact use for Notion in a DevOps context is as a dynamic knowledge base. Forget static, out-of-date Confluence pages. By leveraging Notion’s relational databases, you can create a living, interconnected system for operational knowledge.

Key Components:

Master Services Database: This is the root of your system. Every microservice, application, or piece of infrastructure gets an entry. Properties should include Owner (team), Code Repository (URL), CI/CD Pipeline (URL), On-Call Rotation (Link to PagerDuty/Opsgenie), and a Status.
Runbooks Database: Each entry is a specific runbook. Crucially, this database has a Relation property linking it to the Master Services Database. Now, runbooks are directly associated with the service they support.
Incident Post-Mortems Database: After an incident, the post-mortem is created here. It also links back to the affected service(s), and you can even add another Relation property to link to the specific runbooks that were used or need updating.

Example: A Standardized Runbook Template

Use Notion’s “Template” feature within your Runbooks database to ensure every runbook has the same structure. This enforces consistency and makes information predictable during a high-stress incident.

## Runbook: [Name of Alert or Issue]

### 📖 Summary
- **Service:** @[Link to Service from Master DB]
- **Severity:** High/Medium/Low
- **Contact:** @[On-call Engineer Name] / #[oncall-slack-channel]

### 🚨 Trigger
A clear, concise description of the alert or condition that triggers this runbook. Include the specific alert name from your monitoring system (e.g., "Prometheus: HighMemoryUsage").

### ✅ Validation Steps
1.  Check the service dashboard for initial anomalies. [Link to Grafana Dashboard]
2.  Run the following command to check pod status:
    `kubectl get pods -n  -l app=`
3.  Verify external dependencies (e.g., RDS CPU, SQS queue depth).

### 🛠️ Mitigation Steps
A numbered list of commands and actions to take to resolve the issue. Be explicit and assume the reader is woken up at 3 AM.

1.  **Action:** Restart the deployment to cycle pods.
    `kubectl rollout restart deployment/ -n `
2.  **Action:** If pods are CrashLoopBackOff, check logs.
    `kubectl logs -n   --previous`
3.  **Action:** As a last resort, scale up the database instance via the AWS console. [Link to specific RDS instance]

### 📞 Escalation Path
- If mitigation fails after 15 minutes, escalate to the SRE team lead.
- If the issue involves data corruption, immediately contact the Head of Engineering.

Solution 2: A Lightweight Alternative to Jira for Sprint Planning

For teams that find Jira’s overhead cumbersome or are working on focused projects, Notion can serve as a surprisingly effective project management tool. The key is to connect your tasks directly to the documentation and technical specs they relate to, creating a seamless context switch.

Core Setup: The “Sprints” and “Tasks” Databases

Create two separate databases that are linked together:

Sprints Database: A simple database where each entry is a sprint. Properties: Sprint Name (e.g., “2024-S24”), Start Date, End Date, and Status (Not Started, In Progress, Completed).
Tasks Database: This is your main backlog.
- Properties: Task ID (e.g., DEVOPS-123), Description, Assignee, Priority (P0-P3), Status (Backlog, To Do, In Progress, In Review, Done), and a Relation property linking to the Sprints Database.
- Views: Create a “Board View” grouped by the Status property. This instantly gives you a Kanban board. Filter this board by the “Current” sprint to keep the team focused.

Integrating with Technical Documentation

This is where Notion outshines standalone tools. Imagine a task titled “Implement Redis Caching for User Service.” Inside the Notion page for that task, you can directly embed or link to:

The technical design document outlining the caching strategy.
The runbook for the User Service (from Solution 1).
A sub-page with meeting notes where the task was discussed.

By using the @ mention to link to other pages, you create a rich, interconnected web of information that eliminates the need to hunt for context across multiple applications.

Solution 3: Infrastructure Catalog and Onboarding Orchestrator

Go beyond documentation and use Notion as a human-friendly front-end for managing infrastructure state and team processes. This is about creating a central registry that provides visibility and standardizes complex procedures.

Infrastructure Asset Catalog

Create a database to track major infrastructure components. While your IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation) is the source of truth for configuration, Notion is the source of truth for *metadata and ownership*.

Database: “Infrastructure Assets”
Properties: Asset Name (e.g., “prod-eks-cluster-us-east-1”), Asset Type (EKS Cluster, RDS Instance, VPC), Environment (Prod, Staging), Owner Team, Cost Center, and Link to IaC Module (URL to GitHub/GitLab).
Important Caveat: Never store secrets, API keys, or raw credentials in Notion. This catalog should link to your secrets manager (e.g., HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), not replicate it. Use it for metadata, not sensitive data.

Automated Onboarding Checklists

Use a database and Notion’s template buttons to create a standardized, repeatable onboarding process for new engineers.

## Onboarding Template: [New Engineer Name]

### Assigned Buddy: @[Team Member]
### Start Date: [Date]

---

### Phase 1: Access & Setup (Days 1-2)

- [ ] Request AWS IAM Access (Ticket: [Link to Jira/ServiceNow])
- [ ] Added to GitHub `engineers` Team
- [ ] Local dev environment configured (`docker-compose up` successful)
- [ ] VPN access granted and tested

### Phase 2: Core Services (Days 3-5)

- [ ] Clone and build the `auth-service` repository.
- [ ] Complete code walk-through of `billing-api` with buddy.
- [ ] Deploy a change to the `staging` environment via CI/CD pipeline.

### Phase 3: On-call & Operations (Week 2)

- [ ] Shadow an on-call shift with a senior engineer.
- [ ] Review the top 5 most used runbooks.
- [ ] Acknowledge and resolve a test alert in PagerDuty.

By creating a “New Engineer” button on your team’s home page that spawns this template, you ensure no steps are missed and provide a clear path for new hires to become productive.

Comparison: Notion vs. The Atlassian Suite (Confluence + Jira)

How does this approach stack up against the industry standard? It’s a trade-off between integration and flexibility.

Feature	Notion	Confluence + Jira
Integration Model	All-in-one. Tasks, docs, and databases are natively linked in one unified interface.	Tightly integrated but fundamentally separate products. Requires context switching between UIs.
Flexibility & Customization	Extremely high. “Lego block” approach allows for building bespoke systems from the ground up.	More structured and opinionated. Powerful within its defined workflows, but harder to customize outside of them.
DevOps Tooling	Relies heavily on its API for integrations. Requires more custom scripting or third-party tools (Zapier/Make).	Massive Atlassian Marketplace with countless out-of-the-box integrations for GitHub, Jenkins, Grafana, etc.
Performance	Can become slow and laggy with very large databases (10,000+ rows) and complex relations.	Generally robust and architected for enterprise scale, though can suffer from its own performance bottlenecks.
Learning Curve	Low barrier to entry for basic use, but a high ceiling for mastering system design.	Steeper learning curve, especially for administrators who need to configure complex workflows and permissions.

Ultimately, the best way to use Notion in a DevOps team is to stop treating it like a note-taking app and start treating it like a low-code platform. Pick one of the systems above—knowledge base, project hub, or orchestrator—and build it with discipline. By imposing a clear structure, you can harness Notion’s flexibility instead of being overwhelmed by it.