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

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

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