AI Prompts Library

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.

Incident response plan for [SYSTEM/SERVICE]:

**Severity Levels**:
- **P0 (Critical)**: Total outage, data breach
- **P1 (High)**: Major feature down, perf degradation
- **P2 (Medium)**: Minor feature issue
- **P3 (Low)**: Cosmetic, no user impact

**Response Timeline**:
- P0: Immediate response, 15min updates
- P1: 30min response, hourly updates
- P2: 4hr response, daily updates
- P3: Best effort

**Incident Response Steps**:

**1. Detection & Alerting** (0-5min)
- Monitor alerts trigger
- On-call engineer paged
- Acknowledge alert

**2. Assessment** (5-15min)
- Determine severity
- Identify affected systems/users
- Assemble incident team
- Create incident channel (#incident-123)

**3. Communication** (15-30min)
- Post status page update
- Notify stakeholders
- Start incident log (timeline)

**4. Mitigation** (Ongoing)
- Implement temporary fix
- Monitor metrics
- Update stakeholders regularly

**5. Resolution**
- Deploy permanent fix
- Verify resolution
- Monitor for regression
- Close incident

**6. Post-Mortem** (Within 48hr)
- Timeline of events
- Root cause analysis
- Impact assessment
- Action items (with owners)
- Lessons learned
- Preventive measures

**Communication Templates**:
- Initial: "We're investigating [issue]."
- Update: "Still working. ETA: [time]. Impact: [scope]."
- Resolved: "Issue resolved at [time]. RCA to follow."

**Tools**:
- Monitoring: [Datadog/New Relic]
- On-call: [PagerDuty/Opsgenie]
- Status: [StatusPage]
- Comms: [Slack/Teams]