- name
- incident-runbook-templates
- description
- Create structured incident response runbooks with step-by-step procedures, escalation paths, and recovery actions. Use when building runbooks, responding to incidents, or establishing incident response procedures.
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 MatrixRunbook 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 ScopeCheck 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 DownStep 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 LatencyStep 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_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 SurgeStep 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 - <<EOF apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1 kind: NetworkPolicy metadata: name: block-suspicious namespace: payments spec: podSelector: matchLabels: app: payment-service ingress: - from: - ipBlock: cidr: 0.0.0.0/0 except: - 192.168.1.0/24 # Suspicious range EOF
## Verification StepsVerify service is healthy
curl -s https://api.company.com/payments/health | jq
Verify error rate is back to normal
curl -s "http://prometheus:9090/api/v1/query?query=sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~'5..'}[5m]))" | jq '.data.result[0].value[1]'
Verify latency is acceptable
curl -s "http://prometheus:9090/api/v1/query?query=histogram_quantile(0.99,sum(rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m]))by(le))" | jq
Smoke test critical flows
./scripts/smoke-test-payments.sh
## Rollback ProceduresRollback Kubernetes deployment
kubectl rollout undo deployment/payment-service -n payments
Rollback database migration (if applicable)
./scripts/db-rollback.sh $MIGRATION_VERSION
Rollback feature flag
curl -X POST https://api.company.com/internal/feature-flags \ -d '{"flag": "NEW_PAYMENT_FLOW", "enabled": false}'
## Escalation Matrix
| Condition | Escalate To | Contact |
|-----------|-------------|---------|
| > 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-- 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 < now() - interval '10 minutes';
## Replication Lag-- Check lag on replica SELECT CASE WHEN pg_last_wal_receive_lsn() = pg_last_wal_replay_lsn() THEN 0 ELSE extract(epoch from now() - pg_last_xact_replay_timestamp()) END AS lag_seconds;
-- If lag > 60s, consider: -- 1. Check network between primary/replica -- 2. Check replica disk I/O -- 3. Consider failover if unrecoverable
## Disk Space CriticalCheck 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