Guided runbooks
Runbooks engineers trust under pressure.
Great runbooks are executable: they turn ambiguity into clear steps, safe mitigations, and verification paths. DawnOps helps teams build and maintain runbooks that match how systems really fail.
What makes a runbook usable in an incident.
The difference between documentation and a playbook.
Actionable
Concrete steps and commands, not background context, so responders can move quickly.
Safe by default
Low-risk mitigations first (flags, rollback, degrade) with blast radius awareness.
Verifiable
Every mitigation includes “how to confirm” so teams avoid false fixes and silent failures.
A runbook shape that works across teams.
Keep it consistent so anyone can follow it during a high-stress moment.
| Section | What it answers | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| First 5 minutes | What do I check immediately? | Dashboards, deploys, error budgets, “what changed” links |
| Triage | Is this real, and how bad is it? | Impact scope, customer symptoms, alert correlations |
| Safe mitigations | How do we stop the bleeding? | Rollback, feature flag off, degrade mode, rate limit |
| Verification | How do we know it worked? | SLO recovery, error rate drop, queue drain, synthetic checks |
| Comms | What do we say and when? | Update template, cadence, who is the comms owner |
| Escalation | Who do we pull in? | Service owners, incident commander, vendor support |
Turn incidents into better runbooks.
The fastest way to keep runbooks fresh is to validate them during drills and update them immediately after.
Prompted updates
After a drill, capture what broke: missing dashboards, unclear ownership, risky steps, or undocumented permissions.
Standardize the hard parts
Normalize “warts” and sharp edges so engineers aren’t surprised. Make the gotchas explicit and teach the escape hatches.
A simple runbook rollout plan.
Make progress without boiling the ocean.
Week 1
Pick your top 3 services and define “first 5 minutes” + safe mitigation paths.
Weeks 2–4
Run a drill per service, update runbooks from debriefs, and standardize comms cadence.
Month 2+
Expand coverage to recurring failure modes and track runbook confidence as a readiness signal.