Andreas Deuschl, Dynatrace
Not every learning moment comes from a declared incident. Across many years in SRE and incident response, I’ve seen that a significant portion — often between 30% and 60% — of potential incidents never make it into formal tracking. While this reduces the immediate load on response teams, it also means we miss critical opportunities to learn.
This talk explores the "Un-Incident" — those ambiguous, gray-zone events that don’t meet formal criteria but still reveal gaps in systems, processes, or assumptions. You’ll learn how to recognize these moments, reduce friction in triage and reviews, and shift from debating classification to extracting insight.
With real-world examples and practical strategies I’ve learned over the years, this session offers a fresh lens on incident response — one that values learning over labels.
With over 25 years in tech leadership across Operations, SRE, and Security, Andi Deuschl has encountered (and occasionally caused) his fair share of incidents. As a Product Lead for Delivery, Reliability & Security at Dynatrace, he focuses on sustainable reliability and security practices, incident prevention and response, and continuous learning from both Incidents and Un-Incidents.
author = {Andreas Deuschl},
title = {The {Un-Incident}: Extracting Value from the Gray Area of Incident Response},
year = {2025},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}
