Imagine a suit that is wired with tens of thousands of electrodes. Electrode bundles correspond to microservices within a system at scale. When a Site Reliability Engineer is on call, they have to wear this suit. As a microservice experiences failures, the corresponding electrodes cause a painful sensation. We call this the “Pain Suit.” It’s an absurd metaphor, but a powerful one.

It helped us to think outside of the box, and propose a new discipline that we call Intuition Engineering. We built the tool Vizceral as an example of Intuition Engineering. Vizceral is the first tool that we built to appeal to the brain’s capacity to process massive amounts of visual data in parallel to give users an experience -- a sense, an intuition -- of the state of a holistic system, rather than objective facts.