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Incident Runbook Templates

Seth HobsonCommunityCreated by Seth Hobson

  • Skill
  • Guidelines
  • Cloud and DevOps
  • MIT
  • Low risk

From the author

Create structured incident response runbooks with step-by-step procedures, escalation paths, and recovery actions. Use this skill when building a service outage runbook for a payment processing system; creating database incident procedures covering connection pool exhaustion, replication lag, and disk space alerts; onboarding new on-call engineers who need step-by-step recovery guides written for a 3 AM brain; or standardizing escalation matrices across multiple engineering teams.
— the description by Seth Hobson

AutoGineer summary

Written by AutoGineer from the skill’s own files, not by the author

This skill provides a comprehensive methodology for creating production-ready incident response runbooks. It emphasizes clarity, safety, and maintainability, ensuring that on-call engineers can effectively triage, mitigate, and resolve service outages even under high-stress conditions. The approach focuses on standardizing escalation paths, documenting recovery procedures, and ensuring that runbooks remain accurate through regular verification and clear metadata.

What it does

  • Defines a standardized structure for incident response documentation.
  • Provides templates for service-specific outages and database incident procedures.
  • Establishes clear incident severity levels and escalation matrices.
  • Offers best practices for writing instructions that are resilient to high-stress, low-context environments.
  • Includes patterns for safe execution of destructive commands and verification steps.
  • Suggests communication templates to keep stakeholders informed during active incidents.

When to use it

  • When creating or updating incident response procedures for engineering teams.
  • When building service-specific runbooks for critical infrastructure.
  • When onboarding new on-call engineers to ensure they have clear recovery guides.
  • When standardizing escalation paths across multiple technical teams.
  • When preparing for game days or chaos engineering exercises.

Advantages

  • Reduces cognitive load for engineers responding to incidents at 3 AM.
  • Minimizes the risk of human error during high-pressure recovery tasks.
  • Ensures runbooks remain relevant through metadata and verification requirements.
  • Improves communication consistency between technical teams and stakeholders.
  • Provides a clear, repeatable structure for incident triage and mitigation.

Usage examples

“Create a runbook template for our payment processing service.”
The agent generates a structured document including sections for impact assessment, detection alerts, initial triage steps, and specific mitigation procedures for service outages.
“How should I structure a database incident procedure for connection pool exhaustion?”
The agent provides a template including diagnostic commands to check pool metrics, queries to identify long-running processes, and safe execution steps to terminate backend processes.

Install

  1. Download the skill as a ZIP:

    https://autogineer.com/agent-skills/wshobson/incident-runbook-templates/download
  2. Unzip it into the cross-client skills folder of your project:

    mkdir -p .agents/skills && unzip incident-runbook-templates.zip -d .agents/skills

Documentation by Seth Hobson

Incident Runbook Templates

Production-ready templates for incident response runbooks covering detection, triage, mitigation, resolution, and communication.

When to Use This Skill

  • 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
SeverityImpactResponse TimeExample
SEV1Complete outage, data loss15 minProduction down
SEV2Major degradation30 minCritical feature broken
SEV3Minor impact2 hoursNon-critical bug
SEV4Minimal impactNext business dayCosmetic 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

Detailed patterns and worked examples

Detailed pattern documentation lives in references/details.md. Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient.

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

Troubleshooting

Runbook steps work in staging but fail during a real incident

Steps often assume preconditions that are true in a healthy environment but not during an outage. For each command in your runbook, add a prerequisite check and a "what to do if this command fails" note:

# Step: Check pod status
kubectl get pods -n payments

# Prerequisites: kubectl configured, kubeconfig points to correct cluster
# If this fails: run `aws eks update-kubeconfig --name prod-cluster --region us-east-1`
# Expected output: pods in Running state
On-call engineer panics and skips steps out of order

Add a numbered checklist at the top of the runbook that mirrors the section numbers, so responders can track progress under stress without reading the full document:

## Quick Checklist
- [ ] 1. Declare incident severity and open war room
- [ ] 2. Check service health (Section 4.1)
- [ ] 3. Check recent deployments (Section 4.1)
- [ ] 4. Roll back if deploy is suspect (Section 4.1)
- [ ] 5. Post initial notification to #payments-incidents
- [ ] 6. Escalate if > 15 min unresolved
Runbook is outdated — commands reference old cluster names or endpoints

Runbooks rot because they're updated manually. Include a "Last Verified" date and owner at the top, and add a CI check that validates all curl endpoints and kubectl context names are still valid:

## Runbook Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Last verified | 2024-11-15 |
| Owner | @platform-team |
| Review cadence | After every SEV1/SEV2 |
Stakeholder communication is delayed while engineers are heads-down

Assign a dedicated incident communicator role (separate from the incident commander) whose only job is to post status updates. Add a standing agenda in the communication template:

Update every 15 minutes (even if no new information):
- Current status (Investigating / Mitigating / Monitoring)
- Impact (what is broken, who is affected, % of traffic)
- What we are doing right now
- Next update in: 15 minutes
Database runbook commands cause additional downtime when run incorrectly

Add explicit warnings before destructive SQL commands and require a dry-run output check before executing:

-- WARNING: This terminates active connections. Verify count first.
-- DRY RUN (check count before terminating):
SELECT count(*) FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE state = 'idle' AND query_start < now() - interval '10 minutes';

-- EXECUTE only after verifying count is reasonable (< 50):
SELECT pg_terminate_backend(pid) FROM pg_stat_activity
WHERE state = 'idle' AND query_start < now() - interval '10 minutes';
  • postmortem-writing - After resolving an incident, use postmortem templates to capture root cause and preventive actions

  • on-call-handoff-patterns - Structure shift handoffs so the incoming responder has full context on active incidents

Files

references/details.md

incident-runbook-templates — detailed patterns and worked examples

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

```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
SymptomLikely CauseGo To Section
All requests failingService downSection 4.1
High latencyDatabase/dependencySection 4.2
Partial failuresCode bugSection 4.3
Spike in errorsTraffic surgeSection 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 - <<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

# 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

ConditionEscalate ToContact
> 15 min unresolved SEV1Engineering Manager@manager (Slack)
Data breach suspectedSecurity Team#security-incidents
Financial impact > $10kFinance + Legal@finance-oncall
Customer communication neededSupport 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

```markdown
# 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
```sql
-- 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

Requirements and compatibility

Works with: Claude Code, Claude apps, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Kiro, OpenCode, Goose, Amp, Roo Code, JetBrains Junie, Factory Droid, Devin (ex-Windsurf), Mistral Vibe, OpenHands, Letta

“Works with” means the tool reads the open Agent Skills format; a skill written for one tool may use features others lack.

Needs: Needs a command-line tool

Security

What our scanner noticed· Low risk

  • Instructions that use the network

A static scan is not a guarantee. Skills are third-party content: review a skill before you let an agent use it.

Attribution and licence

Created by
Seth Hobson
Publisher
Seth Hobson (Community)
Source
wshobson/agents · plugins/incident-response/skills/incident-runbook-templates · commit 4bde316
Licence
MIT License (redistribution allowed)
  • LICENSE (added by AutoGineer from LICENSE)
  • ATTRIBUTION.md (written by AutoGineer)
Synced

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