"OK, we have databases up, load balancers responding, DNS records check out, last change/deployment was at this time, all these services are up, and the latest test suite is running all green, this narrows down the places where a failure might be with some useful differential diagnosis, now we can move attention to.."
"I DON'T CARE THAT YOU THINK THINGS ARE WORKING, IF THE CUSTOMER CANNOT GET TO IT, IT'S DOWN"
"Thanks for that helpful input, let's divert troubleshooting attention from this P1 incident, and have a discussion about what "DOWN" means. You want me to treat the working databases as down because the customer can't get to them? Even though they're working?
It's like the hatred for "works on my machine". "WELL I'M NOT RUNNING ON YOUR MACHINE". No you aren't, but this demonstrates the current build works, the commands you're using are coherent and sensible, excludes many possible causes of failure, and adds useful information to the situation.
For troubleshooting and internal use of course you want to describe the outage in precise terms (while being very sure you are not downplaying the impact).
For talking to customers, a sufficiently slow response is the same as no response, and nothing is more irritating than being told 'it's not really down' when they can't use the service.
My customers don't care that the network is down, the servers are down, or aliens have landed. The severity is the same and our infrastructure, regardless of the cause, was down.
During the impacted time period, we did a full DR failover to appengine instances we spun up in west2. This was not a minor hiccup.
But the people who have to fix it, desperately care about which specific part is down. That's just about the highest priority information they need. Honing in on where the problem is, is one of the few ways to get to fixing the problem. Having a boss shout that "everything is down, it's all broken" is the opposite of identifying the problem.
find the idea it was "a ridiculous time to nitpick" hilarious.
What? You lost critical business functionality for 5 hours, and you'd rather the boss was shouting at the workers because the wording used doesn't accurately reflect the boss's understanding, instead of the workers working on solving the problem?
