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  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_PROBLEMATIC_FEATURE", "enabled": true}'

# Step 4: If data issue, check recent data changes
psql -h $DB_HOST -c "
  SELECT * FROM audit_log
  WHERE table_name = 'payment_methods'
  AND created_at > now() - interval '1 hour';"

4.4 Traffic Surge

# Step 1: Check current request rate
kubectl top pods -n payments

# Step 2: Scale horizontally
kubectl scale deployment/payment-service -n payments --replicas=20

# Step 3: Enable rate limiting
kubectl set env deployment/payment-service \
  RATE_LIMIT_ENABLED=true \
  RATE_LIMIT_RPS=1000 -n payments

# Step 4: If attack, block suspicious IPs
kubectl apply -f -  15 min unresolved SEV1 | Engineering Manager | @manager (Slack) |
| Data breach suspected | Security Team | #security-incidents |
| Financial impact > $10k | Finance + Legal | @finance-oncall |
| Customer communication needed | Support Lead | @support-lead |

## Communication Templates

### Initial Notification (Internal)

🚨 INCIDENT: Payment Service Degradation

Severity: SEV2 Status: Investigating Impact: ~20% of payment requests failing Start Time: [TIME] Incident Commander: [NAME]

Current Actions:

• Investigating root cause
• Scaling up service
• Monitoring dashboards

Updates in #payments-incidents

### Status Update

📊 UPDATE: Payment Service Incident

Status: Mitigating Impact: Reduced to ~5% failure rate Duration: 25 minutes

Actions Taken:

• Rolled back deployment v2.3.4 → v2.3.3
• Scaled service from 5 → 10 replicas

Next Steps:

• Continuing to monitor
• Root cause analysis in progress

ETA to Resolution: ~15 minutes

### Resolution Notification

✅ RESOLVED: Payment Service Incident

Duration: 45 minutes Impact: ~5,000 affected transactions Root Cause: Memory leak in v2.3.4

Resolution:

• Rolled back to v2.3.3
• Transactions auto-retried successfully

Follow-up:

• Postmortem scheduled for [DATE]
• Bug fix in progress

Template 2: Database Incident Runbook

# Database Incident Runbook

## Quick Reference
| Issue | Command |
|-------|---------|
| Check connections | `SELECT count(*) FROM pg_stat_activity;` |
| Kill query | `SELECT pg_terminate_backend(pid);` |
| Check replication lag | `SELECT extract(epoch from (now() - pg_last_xact_replay_timestamp()));` |
| Check locks | `SELECT * FROM pg_locks WHERE NOT granted;` |

## Connection Pool Exhaustion
```sql
-- Check current connections
SELECT datname, usename, state, count(*)
FROM pg_stat_activity
GROUP BY datname, usename, state
ORDER BY count(*) DESC;

-- Identify long-running connections
SELECT pid, usename, datname, state, query_start, query
FROM pg_stat_activity
WHERE state != 'idle'
ORDER BY query_start;

-- Terminate idle connections
SELECT pg_terminate_backend(pid)
FROM pg_stat_activity
WHERE state = 'idle'
AND query_start  60s, consider:
-- 1. Check network between primary/replica
-- 2. Check replica disk I/O
-- 3. Consider failover if unrecoverable

Disk Space Critical

# Check disk usage
df -h /var/lib/postgresql/data

# Find large tables
psql -c "SELECT relname, pg_size_pretty(pg_total_relation_size(relid))
FROM pg_catalog.pg_statio_user_tables
ORDER BY pg_total_relation_size(relid) DESC
LIMIT 10;"

# VACUUM to reclaim space
psql -c "VACUUM FULL large_table;"

# If emergency, delete old data or expand disk

## Best Practices

### Do's
- **Keep runbooks updated** - Review after every incident
- **Test runbooks regularly** - Game days, chaos engineering
- **Include rollback steps** - Always have an escape hatch
- **Document assumptions** - What must be true for steps to work
- **Link to dashboards** - Quick access during stress

### Don'ts
- **Don't assume knowledge** - Write for 3 AM brain
- **Don't skip verification** - Confirm each step worked
- **Don't forget communication** - Keep stakeholders informed
- **Don't work alone** - Escalate early
- **Don't skip postmortems** - Learn from every incident

## Resources

- [Google SRE Book - Incident Management](https://sre.google/sre-book/managing-incidents/)
- [PagerDuty Incident Response](https://response.pagerduty.com/)
- [Atlassian Incident Management](https://www.atlassian.com/incident-management)