I'm Christopher Whiten — a military-trained Site Reliability Engineer. Since 1999 I've kept millions of users online across financial services and healthcare by turning reactive firefighting into proactive, measurable reliability — and I build the tools, and train the teams, that make it stick.
From the observability stack that catches a problem to the incident discipline that resolves it — and the tooling that makes both repeatable.
Unified dashboards, distributed tracing, and alerting that surfaces the signal before the outage. Cross-account, multi-brand, at scale.
Battlefield-tested operational discipline applied to production. Clear runbooks, calm triage, and post-mortems that actually change the system.
Always On availability groups, failover exercises, and the drift audits that catch what doesn't fail over — before the failover, not during it.
Multi-account AWS, infrastructure as code, cost and reliability tuned together. The boring, resilient plumbing that never makes the news.
Predictive reliability and AI-in-the-loop triage — using models to shorten the path from symptom to root cause, safely and with a human gate.
I build the tools my teams actually use — offline-first, read-only, and safe on the systems you can't afford to break. Several are free below.
Real tools from real incidents — read-only, offline-capable, no account, no telemetry. Built for DBAs and SREs working on live systems.
An offline triage toolkit for SQL Server Always On / HADR. Failover audits, an AI analyst that reads your paste and returns a runbook, and a full SSMS-style training simulator — all running in the browser, connecting to nothing.
Paste an error log, wait stats, or DMV output — get severity, likely cause, what to check, and the fix.
$0 · nothing stored TRAININGReal incidents replayed in an SSMS + PowerShell sandbox. Novice to expert, no lab servers needed.
$0 · runs in-browser MONITORING · SAASUptime & status-page monitoring I built and run. Know before your users do.
statusowl.ioPost-mortems and reliability notes written between incidents — not in a conference room.
Error 9002 and the panic move that breaks your recovery chain. Read the reason, and often just let the log catch up.
The AG moved the databases. The app still died. The four things that live outside the availability group.
Why "read-only, no connection" turned out to be the safest way to work on systems you can't afford to break.
"In the military, we learned that preparation prevents poor performance. In SRE, I apply the same principle — the failures you predict are the outages you never have."
My approach combines battlefield-tested operational discipline with predictive AI/ML to transform reactive firefighting into proactive reliability engineering. Since 1999, serving millions of users across financial services and healthcare, I've learned that true reliability comes from seeing failures before they occur — and from building the observability and tooling that makes that possible for a whole team, not just one senior engineer.
Today I lead observability and reliability across a family of high-traffic SaaS platforms — multi-account AWS, Grafana and OpenTelemetry, SQL Server HADR, and an increasing amount of AI-assisted operations. And I ship free, offline-first tools so the lessons don't stay locked in one head.
Reliability consulting, hands-on training for your team, or just want to talk shop about tooling and observability.