Operational Sympathy Checklist
Evaluate your architecture's production readiness with our weighted scoring system. Bridge the gap between design and operational excellence.
What is Operational Sympathy?
Operational sympathy means designing systems with deep awareness of production realities—how they'll be deployed, monitored, scaled, debugged, and recovered when things go wrong. It's the difference between "it works on my machine" and "it thrives in production."
This checklist evaluates 9 critical elements that separate production-ready architectures from fragile designs. Each element is weighted by importance, with reliability and observability concerns carrying the most weight.
Pro Tip: Use this checklist during architecture reviews, before production deployments, or when evaluating third-party systems. A score below 60 indicates critical gaps that should be addressed before going live.
Overall Operational Sympathy Score
Weighted score based on importance of each element
Not Production Ready
Insufficient operational sympathy. This architecture lacks essential production-ready characteristics.
Export Assessment Report
Download or copy your operational sympathy assessment to share with your team or include in architecture documentation.
Preview Report
# Operational Sympathy Assessment Report **Date:** February 15, 2026 **Overall Score:** 0/100 **Assessment:** Insufficient operational sympathy. This architecture lacks essential production-ready characteristics. --- ## Summary This architecture achieved an operational sympathy score of **0/100**, indicating it is **not yet production-ready**. ## Element Scores | Element | Score | Weighted | Weight | Status | |---------|-------|----------|--------|--------| | Production-Aware Design | 0/5 | 0.0 | 10% | ❌ Critical | | Load and Scale Consciousness | 0/5 | 0.0 | 15% | ❌ Critical | | Failure-Aware Architecture | 0/5 | 0.0 | 15% | ❌ Critical | | Built-In Observability | 0/5 | 0.0 | 15% | ❌ Critical | | Operability and Recovery | 0/5 | 0.0 | 15% | ❌ Critical | | Security as a Runtime Concern | 0/5 | 0.0 | 10% | ❌ Critical | | Cost Awareness by Design | 0/5 | 0.0 | 10% | ❌ Critical | | Runbook-Driven Thinking | 0/5 | 0.0 | 5% | ❌ Critical | | Shared Ownership of Outcomes | 0/5 | 0.0 | 5% | ❌ Critical | ## Category Breakdown - **Design:** 0% (0.0/10) - **Reliability:** 0% (0.0/30) - **Observability:** 0% (0.0/15) - **Operations:** 0% (0.0/20) - **Security:** 0% (0.0/10) - **Cost:** 0% (0.0/10) - **Culture:** 0% (0.0/5) ## Recommendations ### Priority Improvements **Production-Aware Design** (Current: 0/5, Weight: 10%) - Is production environment, deployment, rollback, and runtime behavior clearly understood and designed for? - Priority: Medium **Load and Scale Consciousness** (Current: 0/5, Weight: 15%) - Does the design explicitly handle peak load, burst traffic, limits, and back-pressure? - Priority: High **Failure-Aware Architecture** (Current: 0/5, Weight: 15%) - Are failure modes identified and handled with graceful degradation instead of catastrophic failure? - Priority: High **Built-In Observability** (Current: 0/5, Weight: 15%) - Are meaningful metrics, logs, traces, and actionable alerts designed into the system? - Priority: High **Operability and Recovery** (Current: 0/5, Weight: 15%) - Can operators mitigate, rollback, and recover quickly without code changes? - Priority: High **Security as a Runtime Concern** (Current: 0/5, Weight: 10%) - Are security failures detectable, credentials rotatable, and blast radius controlled at runtime? - Priority: Medium **Cost Awareness by Design** (Current: 0/5, Weight: 10%) - Is cost behavior under scale understood, bounded, and monitored? - Priority: Medium **Runbook-Driven Thinking** (Current: 0/5, Weight: 5%) - Are known failure scenarios documented with clear diagnosis and remediation steps? - Priority: Low **Shared Ownership of Outcomes** (Current: 0/5, Weight: 5%) - Do architects and developers share accountability for production incidents and outcomes? - Priority: Low --- *Generated by Digital Platform Architect - Operational Sympathy Checklist*
Operational Sympathy Checklist
Rate each element from 0 (not addressed) to 5 (fully implemented). Scores are weighted by importance.
Production-Aware Design
Weight: 10Is production environment, deployment, rollback, and runtime behavior clearly understood and designed for?
Load and Scale Consciousness
Weight: 15Does the design explicitly handle peak load, burst traffic, limits, and back-pressure?
Failure-Aware Architecture
Weight: 15Are failure modes identified and handled with graceful degradation instead of catastrophic failure?
Built-In Observability
Weight: 15Are meaningful metrics, logs, traces, and actionable alerts designed into the system?
Operability and Recovery
Weight: 15Can operators mitigate, rollback, and recover quickly without code changes?
Security as a Runtime Concern
Weight: 10Are security failures detectable, credentials rotatable, and blast radius controlled at runtime?
Cost Awareness by Design
Weight: 10Is cost behavior under scale understood, bounded, and monitored?
Runbook-Driven Thinking
Weight: 5Are known failure scenarios documented with clear diagnosis and remediation steps?
Shared Ownership of Outcomes
Weight: 5Do architects and developers share accountability for production incidents and outcomes?
How to Use This Checklist
Score Each Element (0-5)
0 = Not addressed at all | 3 = Partially implemented | 5 = Fully implemented and battle-tested
Review Your Weighted Score
Scores are automatically weighted by importance. Reliability and observability carry the most weight (15 points each).
Check Category Breakdown
See which categories (reliability, observability, operations, etc.) need the most attention.
Address Low-Scoring Items
Prioritize elements with high weight (15 points) that scored low. These are your biggest production risks.
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