Glean incident runbook

Glean Incident Runbook

Overview

Incident response procedures for Glean enterprise search integration failures. Covers search degradation, connector sync failures, indexing backlogs, and permission sync drift. Glean aggregates knowledge across all company tools, so incidents impact employee productivity across the entire organization. When search breaks or returns stale results, teams lose access to critical institutional knowledge. Classify severity immediately and follow the matching playbook below.

Severity Levels

Level	Definition	Response Time	Example
P1 - Critical	Search fully down or returning zero results	15 min	All queries return empty, API 5xx errors
P2 - High	Connector sync failed, content going stale	30 min	Google Drive connector last synced 24h ago
P3 - Medium	Indexing backlog or partial result degradation	2 hours	New documents not appearing for 4+ hours
P4 - Low	Permission sync drift or single datasource issue	8 hours	One user sees docs they shouldn't access

Diagnostic Steps

# Test search API health
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "HTTP %{http_code}\n" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GLEAN_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -X POST https://your-domain.glean.com/api/v1/search \
  -d '{"query": "test", "pageSize": 1}'

# Check datasource connector status
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $GLEAN_API_TOKEN" \
  https://your-domain.glean.com/api/v1/getdatasourceconfig \
  -d '{"datasource": "DATASOURCE_NAME"}' | jq '.status'

# Verify indexing queue depth
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $GLEAN_API_TOKEN" \
  https://your-domain.glean.com/api/index/v1/getstatus | jq '.statistics'

Incident Playbooks

API Outage

1. Confirm outage with diagnostic curl above and check Glean status page
2. Verify your Glean instance URL resolves and TLS cert is valid
3. Test from multiple networks to rule out local DNS or firewall issues
4. Notify users that search is temporarily unavailable
5. Contact Glean support with instance name, timestamps, and error codes

Authentication Failure

1. Verify API token is set: echo $GLEAN_API_TOKEN | wc -c
2. Check token expiry — Glean tokens may have a TTL configured by your admin
3. Test with a minimal search request (see diagnostics above)
4. If 401: regenerate token in Glean admin console under API settings
5. If 403: verify token scopes include search and indexing permissions

Data Sync Failure

1. Identify which connector failed via getdatasourceconfig for each source
2. Check connector credentials — OAuth tokens for Google/Slack/Confluence may have expired
3. Review connector error logs in Glean admin under Datasource Management
4. Re-authorize the connector if credentials expired
5. Trigger a manual re-crawl for the affected datasource
6. Monitor indexing status until backlog clears

Communication Template

**Incident**: Glean Search [Outage/Degradation]
**Status**: [Investigating/Identified/Mitigating/Resolved]
**Started**: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM UTC
**Impact**: [Search unavailable / results stale since HH:MM / N datasources not syncing]
**Current action**: [Connector re-auth in progress / Glean support engaged / manual re-crawl running]
**Next update**: HH:MM UTC

Post-Incident

• Document timeline from detection to resolution
• Identify root cause (connector auth expiry / Glean platform issue / indexing bottleneck)
• Audit all connector credentials for upcoming expirations
• Verify permission sync is accurate post-recovery
• Add alerting for connector sync age thresholds
• Schedule review of datasource health dashboard weekly

Error Handling

Incident Type	Detection	Resolution
Search degradation	Empty results or low relevance scores	Check API health, verify index freshness
Connector sync failure	Stale content, getdatasourceconfig shows error	Re-authorize connector, trigger manual crawl
Indexing backlog	New docs not searchable after 4+ hours	Monitor queue depth, contact Glean if persistent
Permission sync drift	Users see restricted docs or miss accessible ones	Audit datasource permissions, trigger permission re-sync

Resources

• Glean Developer Portal
• Indexing API
• Search API

Next Steps

See glean-observability for monitoring setup and connector health dashboards.