Incident runbook templates

Incident Runbook Templates

Production-ready templates for incident response runbooks covering detection, triage, mitigation, resolution, and communication.

Do not use this skill when

• The task is unrelated to incident runbook templates
• You need a different domain or tool outside this scope

Instructions

• Clarify goals, constraints, and required inputs.
• Apply relevant best practices and validate outcomes.
• Provide actionable steps and verification.
• If detailed examples are required, open resources/implementation-playbook.md.

Use this skill when

• 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

Runbook Templates

Template 1: Service Outage Runbook

# [Service Name] Outage Runbook

## Overview
**Service**: Payment Processing Service
**Owner**: Platform Team
**Slack**: #payments-incidents
**PagerDuty**: payments-oncall

## Impact Assessment
- [ ] Which customers are affected?
- [ ] What percentage of traffic is impacted?
- [ ] Are there financial implications?
- [ ] What's the blast radius?

## Detection
### Alerts
- `payment_error_rate > 5%` (PagerDuty)
- `payment_latency_p99 > 2s` (Slack)
- `payment_success_rate < 95%` (PagerDuty)

### Dashboards
- [Payment Service Dashboard](https://grafana/d/payments)
- [Error Tracking](https://sentry.io/payments)
- [Dependency Status](https://status.stripe.com)

## Initial Triage (First 5 Minutes)

### 1. Assess Scope
```bash
# Check service health
kubectl get pods -n payments -l app=payment-service

# Check recent deployments
kubectl rollout history deployment/payment-service -n payments

# Check error rates
curl -s "http://prometheus:9090/api/v1/query?query=sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~'5..'}[5m]))"

2. Quick Health Checks

• Can you reach the service? curl -I https://api.company.com/payments/health
• Database connectivity? Check connection pool metrics
• External dependencies? Check Stripe, bank API status
• Recent changes? Check deploy history

3. Initial Classification

Symptom	Likely Cause	Go To Section
All requests failing	Service down	Section 4.1
High latency	Database/dependency	Section 4.2
Partial failures	Code bug	Section 4.3
Spike in errors	Traffic surge	Section 4.4

Mitigation Procedures

4.1 Service Completely Down

# Step 1: Check pod status
kubectl get pods -n payments

# Step 2: If pods are crash-looping, check logs
kubectl logs -n payments -l app=payment-service --tail=100

# Step 3: Check recent deployments
kubectl rollout history deployment/payment-service -n payments

# Step 4: ROLLBACK if recent deploy is suspect
kubectl rollout undo deployment/payment-service -n payments

# Step 5: Scale up if resource constrained
kubectl scale deployment/payment-service -n payments --replicas=10

# Step 6: Verify recovery
kubectl rollout status deployment/payment-service -n payments

4.2 High Latency

# Step 1: Check database connections
kubectl exec -n payments deploy/payment-service -- \
  curl localhost:8080/metrics | grep db_pool

# Step 2: Check slow queries (if DB issue)
psql -h $DB_HOST -U $DB_USER -c "
  SELECT pid, now() - query_start AS duration, query
  FROM pg_stat_activity
  WHERE state = 'active' AND duration > interval '5 seconds'
  ORDER BY duration DESC;"

# Step 3: Kill long-running queries if needed
psql -h $DB_HOST -U $DB_USER -c "SELECT pg_terminate_backend(pid);"

# Step 4: Check external dependency latency
curl -w "@curl-format.txt" -o /dev/null -s https://api.stripe.com/v1/health

# Step 5: Enable circuit breaker if dependency is slow
kubectl set env deployment/payment-service \
  STRIPE_CIRCUIT_BREAKER_ENABLED=true -n payments

4.3 Partial Failures (Specific Errors)

# Step 1: Identify error pattern
kubectl logs -n payments -l app=payment-service --tail=500 | \
  grep -i error | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20

# Step 2: Check error tracking
# Go to Sentry: https://sentry.io/payments

# Step 3: If specific endpoint, enable feature flag to disable
curl -X POST https://api.company.com/internal/feature-flags \
  -d '{"flag": "DISABLE_PROB