Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You can hit every DORA target and still be losing ground. Deploy frequency up, lead time down, change failure rate and MTTR both healthy, but underneath it could be hiding an organization slowly getting worse at turning work into reliable software. New services shipping without clear owners, an attack surface widening faster than anyone is tracking, on-call rotations quietly filling up, a migration that was supposed to close last quarter still limping along.

This is the first post in our DRIVE Deep Dive series. Over the coming month we'll examine each pillar of the DRIVE framework in turn, and map DRIVE against the frameworks engineering leaders already run on, including DORA and SPACE. For the complete model, download the full DRIVE framework.

Incident response is a context problem. The first minutes of any incident are spent reconstructing what the affected service is, what it depends on, and who owns it. That reconstruction happens during the worst possible window. The Cortex catalog already holds this data: services, teams, domains, and the relationships between them, maintained by the engineers who run those systems.

Ask a software engineer what they do and the answer, for years, has been some version of "I write code." That assumption is unwinding fast. AI agents can now write code, review pull requests, run tests, and ship to production, and they're taking on a fast-growing share of that work. As agents absorb more of the execution, the human role shifts.

Most engineering organizations already run something they call an operational review. It usually looks like a cousin of the quarterly business review: a deck assembled every few months, walked through team by team, anchored on whatever incidents happened to land in the previous quarter. By the time leadership sees the data, the systems it describes have moved on and the next set of risks is already accumulating in the gap.