Incident Runbook

Incident Response & Runbook

Trigger phrases: "incident", "incident response", "runbook", "postmortem", "root cause", "outage", "production incident", "post-incident"

Two modes: live incident (what to do right now) and aftermath (postmortem + runbook). Priority: stopping user impact > finding the root cause. No panic, one ordered step at a time.

Live incident — sequence

1. Acknowledge & classify — what is the impact (who, how much), severity (SEV1 full outage … SEV3 minor).
2. Mitigate the impact FIRST — rollback, turn off a feature flag, shift traffic, scale up. Without waiting on the root cause.
3. Single coordinator — it is clear who decides; communication goes through one channel.
4. Diagnose — last change? (deploy/migration/config) narrow it down with logs+metrics+traces (observability).
5. Resolve — the smallest safe fix; then verify (health check).
6. Close — confirm the impact is over; note the timeline (a postmortem input).

Mitigation reflexes

• Last deploy suspect → rollback (deploy revert).
• Suspect feature → turn off the feature flag.
• After a destructive migration → restore from backup (db-migration).
• Dependency/service down → circuit breaker / graceful degradation.

After the incident

Blameless postmortem + producing a durable runbook: references/postmortem.md.

Invariant rules

1. Stop the impact, then understand — the root cause does not hold up the resolution.
2. Blameless culture — the postmortem questions the system, not the person.
3. Actions are owned + dated — no "we'll look at it later".
4. The runbook is executable — real commands/steps, not wishes.
5. Make learning permanent — the lesson goes into an adr/runbook/monitoring, it does not get lost.