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

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