Free assessment / Holiday readiness
Is your stack ready for the holiday peak?
A 3-minute assessment for SRE, DevOps, platform and product teams. Tell us your role, how close the peak is, where you stand and what worries you most. Get a prioritized readiness checklist by email.
Direct answer
Prepare from the bottom of the stack up: third-party providers and expiring credentials, platform limits, a change freeze, customer-journey monitoring with tested alerts, on-call and communication, then load testing and graceful degradation for unexpected traffic.
- Time
- 3 minutes
- Areas
- 8
- Black Friday
- 27 Nov 2026
- Cyber Monday
- 30 Nov 2026
Step 1 / 5
Your role
20%
Which role are you answering for?
Your role decides which areas we weight first.
Holiday readiness series / 8 parts
From provider outages to unexpected traffic.
Each guide covers one layer of holiday reliability and what SRE, DevOps, platform and product teams own.
- 01The peak-season reliability playbookTimeline, layer-by-layer map and who owns what across SRE, DevOps, platform and product.
- 02When third-party providers fail at peakPayments, DNS, CDN, cloud and messaging dependencies, fallbacks and expiring credentials.
- 03Capacity: quotas, connection limits and rate limitsFind the ceilings in cloud quotas, connection pools, autoscaling and plan caps before peak does.
- 04Change freeze and release safetyFreeze dates, critical-fix rules, tested rollbacks and kill switches.
- 05Holiday website monitoring checklistMulti-region, transaction, SSL, DNS, third-party and heartbeat monitoring with actionable alerts.
- 06On-call, runbooks and incident communicationHoliday coverage, escalation authority, status pages and message templates.
- 07Unexpected traffic: load testing and graceful degradationLoad testing at 2 to 3x peak, waiting rooms, caching and keeping checkout up.
- 08After the peak: post-incident reviewsBlameless reviews, near-miss analysis and next year's checklist.
Direct answers
Holiday readiness questions
When should we start preparing for holiday traffic?
Ideally four to six weeks before your first major sales date. That leaves time to load test, fix what you find and put a change freeze in place.
What should we do first if the peak is less than a week away?
Avoid big projects. Lock changes, put multi-step monitoring on checkout and payment, send a test alert to every on-call contact, and prepare status page templates.
Which third-party failures matter most during the holidays?
The ones on the checkout path: payment gateway, DNS, CDN, and email or SMS for order confirmations. Know what happens to checkout if each one fails and monitor them directly.
Who owns holiday readiness?
It is shared. SRE owns monitoring, alerting and incident response, DevOps owns the change freeze and rollbacks, platform owns capacity and resilience, and product owns trade-offs such as which features to switch off under load.