mr-karan Generic Investigation Playbook
Use this skill when a task is clearly an incident investigation but there is no more specific environment or service skill available.
Recommended order
1. Scope the blast radius
Ask:
- which service is affected?
- since when?
- how broad is the impact?
- what is definitely not broken?
2. Check recent change surface
Look for:
- deploys
- config changes
- scaling events
- traffic changes
- dependency degradation
3. Follow the service path
Trace from edge to dependency:
User -> ingress/load balancer -> service -> queue/db/cache/external dependency
Split at the midpoint if the cause is unclear.
4. Use the right template focus
- 5xx spike → error ratio, backend health, deploy timing
- latency → p95/p99, queueing, dependency slowdown, saturation
- OOM/crash loop → exit codes, restart history, memory growth, limits
- broker issue → backlog, pending work, slow consumers, disconnects
- service down → health checks, process state, scheduler/orchestrator status
- deployment regression → compare before and after deploy
- resource exhaustion → utilization relative to limits, not raw percentages alone
Report writing
When concluding, avoid saying only "service is broken". State:
- what failed
- evidence that supports it
- likely impact path
- what a human should verify or do next
Guardrail
If the environment-specific details are unknown, stay generic and state assumptions explicitly.