Firecrawl incident runbook

Firecrawl Incident Runbook

Overview

Rapid incident response procedures for Firecrawl integration failures. Covers API outage triage, credential issues, credit exhaustion, crawl job failures, and webhook delivery problems.

Severity Levels

Level	Definition	Response Time	Examples
P1	Complete failure	< 15 min	API returns 401/500 on all requests
P2	Degraded service	< 1 hour	High latency, partial failures, 429s
P3	Minor impact	< 4 hours	Webhook delays, some empty scrapes
P4	No user impact	Next business day	Monitoring gaps, credit warnings

Quick Triage (Run First)

set -euo pipefail
# 1. Test Firecrawl API directly
echo "=== API Health ==="
curl -s -w "\nHTTP %{http_code}\n" https://api.firecrawl.dev/v1/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com","formats":["markdown"]}' | jq '{success, error}'

# 2. Check credit balance
echo "=== Credits ==="
curl -s https://api.firecrawl.dev/v1/team/credits \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" | jq .

# 3. Check our app health
echo "=== App Health ==="
curl -sf https://api.yourapp.com/health | jq '.services.firecrawl' || echo "App unhealthy"

Decision Tree

Firecrawl API returning errors?
├─ 401: API key invalid
│   → Verify key at firecrawl.dev/app, rotate if needed
├─ 402: Credits exhausted
│   → Upgrade plan or wait for monthly reset
├─ 429: Rate limited
│   → Reduce concurrency, enable backoff, check Retry-After
├─ 500/503: Firecrawl outage
│   → Enable fallback mode, monitor firecrawl.dev status
└─ API working fine
    └─ Our integration issue
        ├─ Empty markdown → Increase waitFor, check target site
        ├─ Crawl stuck → Check job status, enforce timeout
        └─ Webhook not firing → Verify endpoint, check signature

Immediate Actions by Error Type

401 — Authentication Failure

set -euo pipefail
# Verify current key
echo "Key prefix: ${FIRECRAWL_API_KEY:0:5}"
echo "Key length: ${#FIRECRAWL_API_KEY}"

# Test with explicit key
curl -s https://api.firecrawl.dev/v1/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com","formats":["markdown"]}' | jq .success

# If fails: regenerate key at firecrawl.dev/app and update all environments

402 — Credits Exhausted

set -euo pipefail
# Check balance
curl -s https://api.firecrawl.dev/v1/team/credits \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" | jq .

# Immediate: disable non-critical scraping
# Long-term: upgrade plan or implement credit budget

429 — Rate Limited

// Enable emergency rate limiting
const EMERGENCY_DELAY_MS = 5000; // 5s between requests

async function emergencyScrape(url: string) {
  await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, EMERGENCY_DELAY_MS));
  return firecrawl.scrapeUrl(url, { formats: ["markdown"] });
}

500/503 — Firecrawl Outage

// Enable graceful degradation
async function scrapeWithFallback(url: string) {
  try {
    return await firecrawl.scrapeUrl(url, { formats: ["markdown"] });
  } catch (error: any) {
    if (error.statusCode >= 500) {
      console.error("Firecrawl unavailable — using cached content");
      return getCachedContent(url); // serve stale data
    }
    throw error;
  }
}

Communication Templates

Internal (Slack)

P[1-4] INCIDENT: Firecrawl Integration
Status: INVESTIGATING
Impact: [Describe user-facing impact]
Error: [401/402/429/500] — [brief description]
Action: [What you're doing right now]
Next update: [time]

Post-Incident

Evidence Collection

set -euo pipefail
# Collect debug bundle
mkdir -p incident-$(date +%Y%m%d)
curl -s https://api.firecrawl.dev/v1/team/credits \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" > incident-$(date +%Y%m%d)/credits.json

# Application logs
kubectl logs -l app=my-app --since=1h | grep -i firecrawl > incident-$(date +%Y%m%d)/logs.txt 2>/dev/null || true

Postmortem Template

## Incident: Firecrawl [Error Type]
Date: YYYY-MM-DD | Duration: X hours | Severity: P[1-4]

### Summary
[1-2 sentence description]

### Timeline
- HH:MM — [First alert]
- HH:MM — [Investigation started]
- HH:MM — [Root cause identified]
- HH:MM — [Resolved]

### Root Cause
[Technical explanation]

### Action Items
- [ ] [Preventive measure] — Owner — Due date

Error Handling

Issue	Cause	Solution
Can't reach Firecrawl API	Network/DNS issue	Try from different network, check DNS
All scrapes return empty	Target site changed	Verify manually, adjust scrape options
Crawl jobs never complete	Queue backup	Cancel stuck jobs, reduce concurrency
Webhook endpoint unreachable	Deployment issue	Check HTTPS cert, DNS, firewall

Resources

• Firecrawl Dashboard
• Firecrawl Status
• GitHub Issues

Next Steps

For data handling, see firecrawl-data-handling.