Stack Impact Intelligence

Stack Impact Intelligence bridges the gap between raw vendor infrastructure status and your platform's core business capabilities. By connecting the services you depend on to the functional capabilities your teams manage, you transform basic uptime alerts into actionable business context.

What is a Business Capability?

A Business Capability represents a core function of your product or organization. Examples include:

• Payment Processing
• User Authentication
• Video Transcoding
• Notification Delivery

Capabilities are assigned an Owner Team and a Criticality level:

• Low: Minimal impact on user experience.
• Medium: Partial degradation of non-core workflows.
• High: Significant degradation of important workflows.
• Critical: Core business failure.

Setting Up Capabilities

To establish your Stack Impact Intelligence, you create Capability Nodes and assign their dependencies.

1. Navigate to Capabilities in the left sidebar of your dashboard.
2. Click the Configure Capabilities button in the top right.
3. This opens the Capability Settings page where you can view your existing components.

Creating a New Capability

1. Click + New Capability.
2. Enter the Name (e.g. "Checkout Flow").
3. Provide a brief Description so your team knows what it encompasses.
4. Select the Owner Team. Alerting and communication can be targeted based on this ownership.
5. Select the Criticality (Critical, High, Medium, Low).
6. Click Create Capability.

Mapping Dependencies

A Capability is only useful if it knows what infrastructure it relies upon. You can map both whole Services (e.g., Stripe) and specific Components (e.g., AWS S3 in us-east-1).

1. In the Capability Settings page, click on a capability to open its Dependencies drawer.
2. Search available resources in the dropdown. You can toggle between displaying Services or Components.
3. Select the dependencies required for this capability to function.
4. The backend will establish the CapabilityDependency links instantly.

Note: If a full Service is added as a dependency, an outage on that service will directly impact the capability. If specific Components are added, only outages on those specific components will impact the capability.

Stack Health Visualization

Once mapped, the Capabilities Dashboard provides a real-time visualization of your stack health.

• Status Calculation: When an incident occurs on a mapped service or component, the system computes the impact and propagates the degraded status to any related capabilities.
• Triage Stats: At the top of the dashboard, you'll see a quick-glance view of how many capabilities are operational versus in a degraded or outage state.

Incident War Room Context

When an incident alert fires for a vendor (like AWS), your on-call engineers can look at the Capabilities Dashboard and immediately answer: "Which parts of our application are actually broken right now?"

This precise impact context allows for faster customer communication, accurate severity assessment, and smarter degradation strategies during third-party incidents.