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_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 - <

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

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

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)

🚨 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 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
• PagerDuty Incident Response
• Atlassian Incident Management