# Team Qualities Behind a Digital Observability Team's Peak-Season Upgrade

DevFeed: [Team Qualities Behind a Digital Observability Team's Peak-Season Upgrade](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/surviving-and-thriving-through-peak-season-2016-on-the-digital-observability-team-20393.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://target.github.io/agile/surviving-retail-peak-season-on-the-digital-observability-platform-team-a-scrum-master-s-perspective>)

Author: Target Brands, Inc

Published: 2017-05-23T05:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Target](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/target.md>)

Topics: [observability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/observability.md>), [Logging](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/logging.md>), [upgrade](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/upgrade.md>)

Tags: [agile](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agile.md>), [culture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/culture.md>), [devops](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/devops.md>), [elastic](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/elastic.md>), [leadership](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/leadership.md>), [logging](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/logging.md>), [observability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/observability.md>), [on-call](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/on-call.md>), [organizational](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/organizational.md>), [quality](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/quality.md>), [support](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/support.md>), [team](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/team.md>), [upgrade](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/upgrade.md>)

## AI overview

A reflection on a digital observability team after a major Elastic logging-cluster upgrade ahead of Black Friday. The author identifies leadership support, mutual respect, and cooperation during on-call work as qualities that contributed to the team's accomplishments.

## Source excerpt

It is 7:30 AM on a Monday morning in late October. I am waiting in line at Cafe Donuts to bring my team breakfast for our mandated 'no work for one hour'. We just wrapped up a strenuous week of implementing a major upgrade to our Elastic logging cluster. Many digital teams are relying on this upgrade to position themselves to confidently monitor their application health during the most important day in retail - Black Friday. It was a successful, much anticipated upgrade that resulted in many hours of overtime, late night calls, and cross-team performance tests. Morale is high, but it hasn't always been. It has been over three months since the team disassembled to work on new initiatives. I have since had a chance to reflect on the qualities of the team that made it so unique. I can't speak for my colleagues, but the accomplishments we made over six months are my proudest achievements in my five year tenure at Target. Leadership support Our leaders truly supported and enabled our work to be successful. They gave us the resources and confidence to confront organizational blockers and competing priorities. They helped us celebrate wins by providing recognition through updates to high level executives and advertising our achievements in forums. They took risks for us, trusted us to make decisions, and went to bat for us even when there was doubt that we could deliver on our promises. Respect This quality is near and dear to my heart. I never witnessed competition, resentment, distrust, or judgement among the team. Everyone truly respected one another and their unique perspectives. We were all aligned, working towards the same goals, and were in it together. Lead engineers partnered with junior engineers to ensure they understood the entire tech stack and could independently support our customers. I personally felt like my opinions and ideas mattered. On call schedules were set, but we supported one another through escalations and incidents. As a primary on call member,