Agent skill · operations · wshobson
incident-runbook-templates
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.
Why this skill is useful
Provides structured templates and detailed procedures for incident response that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
About 3k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-05. 38,570 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
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 Severity Impact Response Time Example -------- -------------------------- ----------------- ----------------------- SEV1 Complete outage, data loss 15 min Production down SEV2 Major degradation 30 min Critical feature broken SEV3 Minor impact 2 hours Non-critical bug SEV4 Minimal impact Next business day Cosmetic issue 2. Runbook Structure 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. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills wshobson/incident-runbook-templates