incident-runbook-templates

name incident-runbook-templates description Create structured incident response runbooks with step-by-step procedures, escalation paths, and recovery actions. Use this skill when building a service outage runbook for a payment processing system; creating database incident procedures covering connection pool exhaustion, replication lag, and disk space alerts; onboarding new on-call engineers who need step-by-step recovery guides written for a 3 AM brain; or standardizing escalation matrices across multiple engineering teams. Incident Runbook Templates Production-ready templates for incident response runbooks covering detection, triage, mitigation, resolution, and communication. When to Use This Skill Creating incident response procedures Building service-specific runbooks Establishing escalation paths Documenting recovery procedures Responding to active incidents Onboarding on-call engineers Core Concepts 1. Incident Severity Levels Severity Impact Response Time Example SEV1 Complete outage, data loss 15 min Production down SEV2 Major degradation 30 min Critical feature broken SEV3 Minor impact 2 hours Non-critical bug SEV4 Minimal impact Next business day Cosmetic issue 2. Runbook Structure 1. Overview & Impact 2. Detection & Alerts 3. Initial Triage 4. Mitigation Steps 5. Root Cause Investigation 6. Resolution Procedures 7. Verification & Rollback 8. Communication Templates 9. Escalation Matrix Detailed patterns and worked examples Detailed pattern documentation lives in references/details.md . Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient. Best Practices Do's Keep runbooks updated - Review after every incident Test runbooks regularly - Game days, chaos engineering Include rollback steps - Always have an escape hatch Document assumptions - What must be true for steps to work Link to dashboards - Quick access during stress Don'ts Don't assume knowledge - Write for 3 AM brain Don't skip verification - Confirm each step worked Don't forget communication - Keep stakeholders informed Don't work alone - Escalate early Don't skip postmortems - Learn from every incident Troubleshooting Runbook steps work in staging but fail during a real incident Steps often assume preconditions that are true in a healthy environment but not during an outage. For each command in your runbook, add a prerequisite check and a "what to do if this command fails" note: # Step: Check pod status kubectl get pods -n payments # Prerequisites: kubectl configured, kubeconfig points to correct cluster # If this fails: run `aws eks update-kubeconfig --name prod-cluster --region us-east-1` # Expected output: pods in Running state On-call engineer panics and skips steps out of order Add a numbered checklist at the top of the runbook that mirrors the section numbers, so responders can track progress under stress without reading the full document: ## Quick Checklist - [ ] 1. Declare incident severity and open war room - [ ] 2. Check service health (Section 4.1) - [ ] 3. Check recent deployments (Section 4.1) - [ ] 4. Roll back if deploy is suspect (Section 4.1) - [ ] 5. Post initial notification to #payments-incidents - [ ] 6. Escalate if > 15 min unresolved Runbook is outdated — commands reference old cluster names or endpoints Runbooks rot because they're updated manually. Include a "Last Verified" date and owner at the top, and add a CI check that validates all curl endpoints and kubectl context names are still valid: ## Runbook Metadata | Field | Value | |---|---| | Last verified | 2024-11-15 | | Owner | @platform-team | | Review cadence | After every SEV1/SEV2 | Stakeholder communication is delayed while engineers are heads-down Assign a dedicated incident communicator role (separate from the incident commander) whose only job is to post status updates. Add a standing agenda in the communication template: Update every 15 minutes (even if no new information): - Current status (Investigating / Mitigating / Monitoring) - Impact (what is broken, who is affected, % of traffic) - What we are doing right now - Next update in: 15 minutes Database runbook commands cause additional downtime when run incorrectly Add explicit warnings before destructive SQL commands and require a dry-run output check before executing: -- WARNING: This terminates active connections. Verify count first. -- DRY RUN (check count before terminating): SELECT count ( * ) FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE state = 'idle' AND query_start < now() - interval '10 minutes' ; -- EXECUTE only after verifying count is reasonable (< 50): SELECT pg_terminate_backend(pid) FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE state = 'idle' AND query_start < now() - interval '10 minutes' ; Related Skills postmortem-writing - After resolving an incident, use postmortem templates to capture root cause and preventive actions on-call-handoff-patterns - Structure shift handoffs so the incoming responder has full context on active incidents