Gamifying Incident Response: GDG IIIT Nagpur Launches 'KEEP ALIVE '26' SRE Student Hackathon

GDG on Campus IIIT Nagpur has announced KEEP ALIVE '26, a national incident-response hackathon built specifically for undergraduate and diploma students. Unlike traditional hackathons where participants build new apps, KEEP ALIVE '26 throws students directly into the deep end of on-call operational engineering.

What Makes 'KEEP ALIVE '26' Unique?

Rather than coding from scratch, competing teams receive telemetry data, Grafana dashboards, logs, traces, and alerts from a broken microservices architecture. The objective is to diagnose the root cause under time pressure and present a fix—simulating the real-world operational chaos an SRE experiences during a major system outage.

Key event highlights include:

• Official Partner: Grafana (Platform Partner) providing real telemetry environments.
• Format: Online screening round followed by an on-campus finale at IIIT Nagpur.
• Target Audience: Students with 6–12 months of DevOps exposure, emphasizing practical troubleshooting over production experience.

Bridging the Gap in SRE Education

Simulated incident response competitions are critical for bridge-building between academic theory and real-world infrastructure reliability. Modern systems fail in complex ways—ranging from unhandled third-party API downtimes and silent background cron failures to unexpected SSL certificate expirations.

How Proactive Monitoring Prevents On-Call Nightmares

While training students to debug live incidents is vital, preventing outages entirely remains the core philosophy of Site Reliability Engineering. Rabbit SaaS equips engineering teams with automated, proactive safeguards to eliminate routine failure vectors before they trigger late-night alerts:

• Cron Rabbit: Ensures background workers and scheduled jobs ping consistently, preventing silent batch failures.
• Certificate Guardian: Automatically monitors SSL/TLS expiration dates and CT logs so certificates never cause unexpected downtime.
• Domain Audit HQ: Tracks domain expiration and WHOIS changes before DNS routing breaks.
• CloudStatusHQ: Aggregates health status from external vendor dependencies so you know immediately if an outage is on your end or an upstream provider's.
• Status Navigator: Keeps stakeholders updated with custom-branded incident pages during critical incidents.