# Mistral Incident Runbook

> Execute Mistral AI incident response procedures with triage, mitigation, and postmortem. Use when responding to Mistral AI-related outages, investigating errors, or running post-incident reviews for Mistral AI integration failures. Trigger with phrases like "mistral incident", "mistral outage", "mistral down", "mistral on-call", "mistral emergency", "mistral broken".

- Skill: `tools-only/mistral-incident-runbook` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 3 files)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds add tools-only/mistral-incident-runbook`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/tools-only/mistral-incident-runbook/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Integrations & APIs
- License: MIT
- Author: tools-only (https://skillmd.com/u/tools-only)
- Updated: 2026-09-08
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/tools-only/mistral-incident-runbook

---


# Mistral AI Incident Runbook

## Overview
Rapid incident response procedures for Mistral AI-related outages.

## Prerequisites
- Access to Mistral AI console
- kubectl access to production cluster (if applicable)
- Prometheus/Grafana access
- Communication channels (Slack, PagerDuty)

## Severity Levels

| Level | Definition | Response Time | Examples |
|-------|------------|---------------|----------|
| P1 | Complete outage | < 15 min | Mistral API unreachable, all requests failing |
| P2 | Degraded service | < 1 hour | High latency, partial failures, rate limiting |
| P3 | Minor impact | < 4 hours | Occasional errors, non-critical feature down |
| P4 | No user impact | Next business day | Monitoring gaps, documentation issues |

## Quick Triage

```bash
#!/bin/bash
# mistral-triage.sh

echo "=== Mistral AI Quick Triage ==="
echo "Timestamp: $(date)"
echo ""

# 1. Check Mistral API health
echo "1. Checking Mistral API..."
HTTP_STATUS=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${MISTRAL_API_KEY}" \
  https://api.mistral.ai/v1/models)
echo "   API Status: $HTTP_STATUS"

# 2. Check our health endpoint
echo ""
echo "2. Checking our service health..."
curl -s https://api.yourapp.com/health | jq '.services.mistral' 2>/dev/null || echo "   Health check failed"

# 3. Check recent error rate
echo ""
echo "3. Recent errors (if Prometheus available)..."
curl -s "localhost:9090/api/v1/query?query=rate(mistral_errors_total[5m])" | jq '.data.result' 2>/dev/null || echo "   Prometheus not available"

# 4. Check recent logs
echo ""
echo "4. Recent error logs..."
kubectl logs -l app=mistral-service --since=5m 2>/dev/null | grep -i error | tail -10 || echo "   kubectl not available"
```

## Decision Tree

```
Mistral API returning errors?
├─ YES: Check api.mistral.ai/v1/models with curl
│   ├─ 401 → API key issue (see Auth section)
│   ├─ 429 → Rate limited (see Rate Limit section)
│   ├─ 5xx → Mistral service issue (wait & monitor)
│   └─ Timeout → Network issue (check connectivity)
└─ NO: Our service returning errors?
    ├─ YES → Check our logs & config
    └─ NO → Likely resolved, continue monitoring
```

## Immediate Actions by Error Type

### 401 Unauthorized - Authentication Failed

```bash
# 1. Verify API key is set
echo "API Key length: ${#MISTRAL_API_KEY}"
echo "API Key prefix: ${MISTRAL_API_KEY:0:10}..."

# 2. Test API key directly
curl -v -H "Authorization: Bearer ${MISTRAL_API_KEY}" \
  https://api.mistral.ai/v1/models

# 3. Check if key was rotated
# → Verify in Mistral console: console.mistral.ai

# 4. Update key if needed
kubectl create secret generic mistral-secrets \
  --from-literal=api-key="$NEW_API_KEY" \
  --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -

# 5. Restart pods
kubectl rollout restart deployment/mistral-service
```

### 429 Rate Limited

```bash
# 1. Check current rate limit status
curl -v -H "Authorization: Bearer ${MISTRAL_API_KEY}" \
  https://api.mistral.ai/v1/models 2>&1 | grep -i "rate\|retry"

# 2. Enable request queuing (if supported)
kubectl set env deployment/mistral-service RATE_LIMIT_MODE=queue

# 3. Reduce request concurrency
kubectl set env deployment/mistral-service MAX_CONCURRENT_REQUESTS=5

# 4. Long-term: Contact Mistral for limit increase
# → console.mistral.ai or support@mistral.ai
```

### 500/503 Service Error

```bash
# 1. Check Mistral status (if available)
echo "Checking Mistral status..."

# 2. Enable graceful degradation
kubectl set env deployment/mistral-service MISTRAL_FALLBACK=true

# 3. Notify users
# → Update status page

# 4. Monitor for recovery
watch -n 30 'curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" -H "Authorization: Bearer ${MISTRAL_API_KEY}" https://api.mistral.ai/v1/models'
```

### Timeout/Network Error

```bash
# 1. Test connectivity
curl -v --connect-timeout 5 https://api.mistral.ai/v1/models

# 2. Check DNS resolution
nslookup api.mistral.ai

# 3. Increase timeout
kubectl set env deployment/mistral-service MISTRAL_TIMEOUT=60000

# 4. Check egress rules
kubectl get networkpolicy
```

## Communication Templates

### Internal (Slack)
```
:red_circle: P1 INCIDENT: Mistral AI Integration
**Status**: INVESTIGATING
**Impact**: [Users cannot use AI features / Degraded AI responses]
**Current action**: [What you're doing]
**Next update**: [Time - typically every 15-30 min for P1]
**Incident commander**: @[name]
```

### External (Status Page)
```
AI Feature Degradation

We're experiencing issues with our AI-powered features.
Some users may experience slower responses or temporary unavailability.

Our team is actively investigating and working with our AI provider to resolve this.

Affected services:
- [List affected features]

Workaround: [If available]

Last updated: [timestamp]
```

## Post-Incident

### Evidence Collection

```bash
#!/bin/bash
# collect-evidence.sh

INCIDENT_DIR="incident-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)"
mkdir -p "$INCIDENT_DIR"

# Collect logs
kubectl logs -l app=mistral-service --since=1h > "$INCIDENT_DIR/logs.txt"

# Export metrics
curl "localhost:9090/api/v1/query_range?query=mistral_errors_total&start=$(date -d '2 hours ago' +%s)&end=$(date +%s)&step=60" \
  > "$INCIDENT_DIR/metrics.json"

# Collect config (redacted)
kubectl get deployment mistral-service -o yaml | grep -v "api-key" > "$INCIDENT_DIR/deployment.yaml"

# Create bundle
tar -czf "$INCIDENT_DIR.tar.gz" "$INCIDENT_DIR"
echo "Evidence bundle: $INCIDENT_DIR.tar.gz"
```

### Postmortem Template

```markdown
## Incident: Mistral AI [Error Type]
**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD
**Duration:** X hours Y minutes
**Severity:** P[1-4]
**Incident Commander:** [Name]

### Summary
[1-2 sentence description of what happened]

### Timeline (UTC)
| Time | Event |
|------|-------|
| HH:MM | First alert triggered |
| HH:MM | Incident declared |
| HH:MM | Root cause identified |
| HH:MM | Mitigation applied |
| HH:MM | Service restored |

### Root Cause
[Technical explanation of what went wrong]

### Impact
- Users affected: [Number or percentage]
- Duration of impact: [Time]
- Requests failed: [Number]
- Revenue impact: [If applicable]

### Detection
How was the incident detected?
- [ ] Automated alerting
- [ ] Customer report
- [ ] Internal testing
- [ ] Other: ___

### Resolution
[What was done to fix the issue]

### Action Items
| Priority | Action | Owner | Due Date | Status |
|----------|--------|-------|----------|--------|
| P1 | [Immediate fix] | @name | YYYY-MM-DD | [ ] |
| P2 | [Preventive measure] | @name | YYYY-MM-DD | [ ] |
| P3 | [Improvement] | @name | YYYY-MM-DD | [ ] |

### Lessons Learned
- What went well:
- What could be improved:
- What we got lucky with:
```

## Output
- Issue identified and categorized
- Mitigation applied
- Stakeholders notified
- Evidence collected for postmortem

## Error Handling
| Issue | Cause | Solution |
|-------|-------|----------|
| kubectl fails | Auth expired | Re-authenticate with cloud provider |
| Metrics unavailable | Prometheus down | Check backup metrics or logs |
| Secret rotation fails | Permission denied | Escalate to admin |
| Fallback not working | Not implemented | Use cached responses or error page |

## Examples

### One-Line Health Check
```bash
curl -sf -H "Authorization: Bearer ${MISTRAL_API_KEY}" https://api.mistral.ai/v1/models | jq '.data[0].id' || echo "UNHEALTHY"
```

### Quick Rollback
```bash
kubectl rollout undo deployment/mistral-service && \
kubectl rollout status deployment/mistral-service
```

## Resources
- [Mistral AI Console](https://console.mistral.ai/)
- [Mistral AI Documentation](https://docs.mistral.ai/)

## Next Steps
For data handling, see `mistral-data-handling`.