Speak Incident Runbook

Speak Incident Runbook

Overview

Rapid incident response procedures for Speak language learning-related outages.

Prerequisites

• Access to Speak dashboard and status page
• kubectl access to production cluster
• Prometheus/​Grafana access
• Communication channels (Slack, PagerDuty)

Severity Levels

Quick Triage

#!/​bin/​bash
# speak-triage.sh

echo "=== Speak Quick Triage ==="
echo "Time: $(date)"
echo ""

# 1. Check Speak status
echo "1. Speak Status Page:"
curl -s https://status.speak.com/​api/​status | jq '.status'
echo ""

# 2. Check our integration health
echo "2. Our Health Check:"
curl -s https://api.yourapp.com/​health | jq '.services.speak'
echo ""

# 3. Check active sessions
echo "3. Active Sessions:"
curl -s "localhost:9090/​api/​v1/​query?query=speak_active_sessions" | jq '.data.result[0].value[1]'
echo ""

# 4. Check error rate (last 5 min)
echo "4. Error Rate (5m):"
curl -s "localhost:9090/​api/​v1/​query?query=rate(speak_api_errors_total[5m])" | jq '.data.result'
echo ""

# 5. Check lesson completion rate
echo "5. Lesson Completion Rate (1h):"
curl -s "localhost:9090/​api/​v1/​query?query=rate(speak_lessons_completed_total[1h])/​rate(speak_lessons_started_total[1h])" | jq '.data.result[0].value[1]'
echo ""

# 6. Recent error logs
echo "6. Recent Errors:"
kubectl logs -l app=speak-integration --since=5m 2>/​dev/​null | grep -i error | tail -10

Decision Tree

Speak API returning errors?
├─ YES: Is status.speak.com showing incident?
│   ├─ YES → Wait for Speak to resolve. Enable fallback/​offline mode.
│   └─ NO → Our integration issue. Check credentials, config, code.
└─ NO: Are lessons working?
    ├─ YES: Is speech recognition working?
    │   ├─ YES → Likely resolved or intermittent. Monitor.
    │   └─ NO → Audio processing issue. Check audio infrastructure.
    └─ NO → Our service issue. Check pods, memory, database.

Immediate Actions by Error Type

401/​403 - Authentication Failures

# Verify API credentials are set
kubectl get secret speak-secrets -o jsonpath='{.data.api-key}' | base64 -d | head -c 10
echo "..."

# Check if credentials were rotated
# → Verify in Speak developer dashboard

# Remediation: Update secret and restart pods
kubectl create secret generic speak-secrets \
  --from-literal=api-key=NEW_KEY \
  --from-literal=app-id=APP_ID \
  --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -

kubectl rollout restart deployment/​speak-integration

429 - Rate Limited

# Check current rate limit status
curl -v https://api.speak.com/​v1/​health \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${SPEAK_API_KEY}" 2>&1 | grep -i "rate"

# Enable request queuing/​throttling
kubectl set env deployment/​speak-integration SPEAK_RATE_LIMIT_MODE=queue

# For persistent issues, contact Speak for limit increase

500/​503 - Speak Server Errors

# Enable graceful degradation (offline lessons if available)
kubectl set env deployment/​speak-integration SPEAK_FALLBACK_MODE=true

# Enable cached responses
kubectl set env deployment/​speak-integration SPEAK_CACHE_ONLY=true

# Update status page for users
# Monitor Speak status for resolution

Speech Recognition Failures

# Check audio processing service
kubectl get pods -l component=audio-processor

# Check audio queue depth
curl -s "localhost:9090/​api/​v1/​query?query=speak_audio_queue_depth"

# Scale audio processors if needed
kubectl scale deployment/​audio-processor --replicas=5

# Verify audio storage is accessible
gsutil ls gs://your-audio-bucket/

Communication Templates

Internal (Slack)

🔴 P1 INCIDENT: Speak Language Learning
Status: INVESTIGATING
Impact: Users cannot start or complete lessons
Languages affected: All
Current action: Checking Speak API status and our integration
Next update: [Time + 15 min]
Incident commander: @[name]
War room: #speak-incident-[date]

External (Status Page)

Language Learning Service Disruption

We are experiencing issues with our language learning features.
Users may be unable to:
- Start new lessons
- Complete pronunciation exercises
- Access speech recognition

We are actively working with our service provider to resolve this issue.
Offline vocabulary practice remains available.

Last updated: [timestamp]

User Notification (In-App)

We're experiencing technical difficulties with live lessons.
While we work on a fix, you can:
• Practice vocabulary flashcards (offline)
• Review previous lesson notes
• Listen to saved audio examples

We'll notify you when full service is restored.

Fallback Modes

Enable Offline Mode

// Fallback when Speak API is unavailable
async function getLesson(config: LessonConfig): Promise<Lesson> {
  if (process.env.SPEAK_FALLBACK_MODE === 'true') {
    return getOfflineLesson(config);
  }

  try {
    return await speakService.startSession(config);
  } catch (error) {
    if (isApiUnavailable(error)) {
      console.warn('Speak API unavailable, using fallback');
      return getOfflineLesson(config);
    }
    throw error;
  }
}

Cached Responses

// Serve cached content when API is slow/​unavailable
async function getTutorPrompt(sessionId: string): Promise<TutorPrompt> {
  const cacheKey = `prompt:${sessionId}`;

  // Try cache first during incidents
  if (process.env.SPEAK_CACHE_ONLY === 'true') {
    const cached = await cache.get(cacheKey);
    if (cached) return cached;
    throw new Error('Prompt not in cache during incident');
  }

  // Normal flow with cache fallback
  try {
    const prompt = await speakService.tutor.getPrompt(sessionId);
    await cache.set(cacheKey, prompt, 3600);
    return prompt;
  } catch (error) {
    const cached = await cache.get(cacheKey);
    if (cached) return cached;
    throw error;
  }
}

Post-Incident

Evidence Collection

#!/​bin/​bash
# collect-speak-incident-evidence.sh

INCIDENT_DIR="speak-incident-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M)"
mkdir -p "$INCIDENT_DIR"

# Export logs
kubectl logs -l app=speak-integration --since=2h > "$INCIDENT_DIR/​logs.txt"

# Export metrics
curl "localhost:9090/​api/​v1/​query_range?query=speak_api_errors_total&start=$(date -d '2 hours ago' +%s)&end=$(date +%s)&step=60" > "$INCIDENT_DIR/​errors.json"

curl "localhost:9090/​api/​v1/​query_range?query=speak_lessons_started_total&start=$(date -d '2 hours ago' +%s)&end=$(date +%s)&step=60" > "$INCIDENT_DIR/​lessons.json"

# Capture current state
kubectl get pods -l app=speak-integration -o yaml > "$INCIDENT_DIR/​pods.yaml"
kubectl get events --sort-by='.lastTimestamp' > "$INCIDENT_DIR/​events.txt"

# Generate debug bundle
./​speak-debug-bundle.sh
mv speak-debug-*.tar.gz "$INCIDENT_DIR/"

echo "Evidence collected in $INCIDENT_DIR"

Postmortem Template

## Incident: Speak [Error Type]
**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD
**Duration:** X hours Y minutes
**Severity:** P[1-4]
**Affected Users:** N (X% of daily active learners)

### Summary
[1-2 sentence description of what happened]

### User Impact
- Lessons affected: N
- Languages affected: [list]
- Features unavailable: [list]
- Estimated learning time lost: X hours

### Timeline
- HH:MM - [Event]
- HH:MM - Alert fired
- HH:MM - Incident declared
- HH:MM - [Mitigation action]
- HH:MM - Service restored

### Root Cause
[Technical explanation]

### Contributing Factors
- [Factor 1]
- [Factor 2]

### Action Items
| Priority | Action | Owner | Due |
|----------|--------|-------|-----|
| P1 | [Preventive measure] | @name | [date] |
| P2 | [Improvement] | @name | [date] |

### Lessons Learned
- What went well: [list]
- What could be improved: [list]

Output

• Issue identified and categorized
• Mitigation applied
• Stakeholders notified
• Evidence collected for postmortem
• Fallback modes enabled if needed

Error Handling

Examples

One-Line Health Check

curl -sf https://api.yourapp.com/​health | jq '.services.speak.status' || echo "UNHEALTHY"

Quick Fallback Toggle

# Enable fallback
kubectl set env deployment/​speak-integration SPEAK_FALLBACK_MODE=true

# Disable fallback (restore normal)
kubectl set env deployment/​speak-integration SPEAK_FALLBACK_MODE-

Resources

• Speak Status Page
• Speak Support
• Internal Runbook Wiki

Next Steps

For data handling, see speak-data-handling.