# Ready for chaos? ## **When are you ready for chaos?** **Running a Chaos Day requires people’s time and system usage, so it needs to be as carefully scheduled as any other piece of work. The immediate benefit of a Chaos Day might not be as appealing or tangible as new features. This means that investment in a Chaos Day is frequently put off.** This challenge can be addressed by starting with the smaller investment of a time-boxed system risk assessment using an approach such as [FAIR](https://www.fairinstitute.org/what-is-fair). This provides an opportunity to explore what failures could happen, their frequency and the magnitude of their impact. This gives meaningful, monetary data that can help stakeholders re-evaluate prioritising features over resilience. Chaos Days provide particular benefits if run weeks or months before major changes are deployed to production, or ahead of traffic peaks such as Black Friday for e-commerce sites. Ensure there is a sufficient gap between consecutive events to allow for learning to be distilled and improvements to be applied. For one client with a very large platform (1,000 microservices, processing 1 billion requests on a peak day), we found that 2–3 Chaos Days each year was a suitable frequency for their context. **Despite the many benefits of Chaos Days, if your production system is regularly “on fire”, you probably have enough ready-made chaos to contend with! In this case, your focus should be on running and** [**improving post-incident reviews**](https://extfiles.etsy.com/DebriefingFacilitationGuide.pdf) **to bring about system stability. Once you’ve had a few months free of repeated production issues, try and run a small Chaos Day (in pre-production) to further explore system stability.** ![](https://2234355326-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2F-M1A2SwkHXZYbAGZBAoX%2Fuploads%2FgYkUQmxhFwdGf4pYq2dy%2Fready%404x.png?alt=media\&token=d75813f3-dbae-4689-9049-03b78cc1584a) --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://playbooks.equalexperts.com/chaos-day-playbook/ready-for-chaos.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.