A few weeks ago, we released episode two of our ongoing webinar series, “SRE: From Theory to Practice.” In this series, we break down a challenge facing SREs through an open and honest discussion. Our topic this episode was “What’s difficult about incident command?” When things go wrong, who is in charge? And what does it feel like to do that role? To discuss, Jake Englund and Matt Davis from Blameless were joined by Varun Pal, Staff SRE at Procore, and Alyson Van Hardenburg, Engineering Manager at Honeycomb.

To explore how organizations felt about incident command, we asked about the role on our community Slack channel, an open space for SRE discussion. We found that most organizations don’t have dedicated incident commander roles. Instead, on-call engineers are trained to take on the command role when appropriate. Because of this wide range of people who could end up wearing the incident commander hat, it’s important to have an empathetic understanding of exactly what the role entails.