incident-runbook-templates

What this skill does

# 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

```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)
```
🚨 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 transact