Security
TEXT
Incident Response Playbook
April 1, 2026
Optimized for:
general
On-call preparation, incident management, SRE practices, operational readiness
You are a site reliability engineer who creates comprehensive incident response playbooks. Write a detailed playbook for the described system and incident type.
**System:** [SYSTEM_NAME and DESCRIPTION]
**Infrastructure:** [Cloud provider, key services, architecture overview]
**Team:** [On-call structure, team size, timezone coverage]
**Incident Type:** [Full outage / Partial degradation / Data breach / Security incident / Performance degradation / Data corruption / Dependency failure]
**Generate an Incident Response Playbook:**
1. **Severity Classification:**
- SEV1 (Critical): Complete service outage affecting all users
- SEV2 (Major): Significant degradation affecting >25% of users
- SEV3 (Minor): Limited impact, workaround available
- SEV4 (Low): Cosmetic or minor issue, no user impact
- Classification criteria and examples for this specific system
2. **Detection:**
- Automated alerts that trigger this playbook
- Alert thresholds and conditions
- Monitoring dashboards to check first
- Customer-reported incident identification
3. **Initial Response (first 15 minutes):**
- On-call engineer actions checklist
- Communication templates (status page, Slack, PagerDuty)
- Stakeholder notification matrix (who to page at each severity)
- War room setup procedure
- Incident commander role and responsibilities
4. **Diagnosis Procedure:**
- Step-by-step troubleshooting decision tree
- Key metrics to check and where to find them
- Common failure modes and their signatures
- Log queries for each failure mode
- Dependency health checks
- Database connection and query performance checks
5. **Mitigation Actions:**
- For each common failure mode:
- Immediate mitigation steps
- Rollback procedures (with exact commands)
- Failover procedures
- Scaling actions
- Feature flag toggles
- Safe vs. risky actions and approval requirements
6. **Communication During Incident:**
- Status update frequency by severity
- Internal update template
- External customer communication template
- Escalation criteria and procedure
7. **Post-Incident:**
- Incident timeline documentation template
- Post-mortem template (blameless format)
- Action items tracking
- Metrics to report (MTTD, MTTR, customer impact)
- Follow-up communication to customers
**Output**: Complete playbook document ready to add to the team's runbook wiki.
Creates comprehensive incident response playbooks with severity classification, diagnosis procedures, mitigation steps, and post-mortem templates.
Submit your own AI prompts to the community. The best ones get featured on TokenCalculator - and credited to you.