Peak weekends exposed failures nobody could explain.
The core was a legacy PHP system that had grown by accretion, with the original authors long gone. Its deploy pipeline worked. The deeper problem was a web of queues and background workers that failed constantly without metrics.
When a worker died or fell behind, the business felt the symptom, but the team could not say why it happened or which part of the chain was the bottleneck. Ticketing load arrived in spikes, and the biggest events happened on weekends, exactly when database queries and unobserved workers were most likely to degrade the purchase and ticket flow.
The mandate had two goals: improve performance and reduce the weekend incidents that put the revenue path at risk.
