Incident Runbook Templates
Production-ready templates for incident response runbooks covering detection, triage, mitigation, resolution, and communication.
When to Use This Skill
- •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
code
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
markdown
# [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
| 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
bash
# 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
bash
# 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)
bash
# 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
bash
# 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 - <<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 Steps
bash
# Verify 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 Procedures
bash
# Rollback 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)
code
🚨 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
code
📊 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
code
✅ 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
code
### Template 2: Database Incident Runbook ```markdown # 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 < now() - interval '10 minutes';
Replication Lag
sql
-- 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 Critical
bash
# 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
code
## 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)