runbook-generator

Purpose

Produce clear, foolproof, executable operational runbooks for on-call engineers to diagnose, mitigate, and resolve production alerts under pressure.

When to Use

• Creating runbooks for new microservices, alerts, or cron jobs.
• Standardizing incident response procedures across engineering teams.
• Documenting disaster recovery failovers, certificate renewals, and manual database rollbacks.

What to Analyze

1. Alert Definition: Alert name, firing trigger threshold, severity, and impacted customer services.
2. Triage & Diagnosis: Step-by-step commands and dashboard links to verify if it is a real issue or false positive.
3. Mitigation Steps: Fast containment actions (rollback, traffic reroute, scaling up, cache purge).
4. Root Cause Resolution: Permanent investigative steps to fix the underlying problem.
5. Escalation Policy: Who to page if mitigation does not restore service within 15 minutes.

Output Format

• Alert Metadata: Severity, SLI/SLA impacted, PagerDuty link.
• Diagnostic Commands: Copy-pasteable CLI commands (kubectl, curl, SQL) with expected output.
• Mitigation Playbook: Numbered actions in order of speed.
• Rollback & Safety Checks: How to verify recovery before closing the incident.

Avoid

• Vague instructions like "check the logs" without exact log query filters or links.
• Omitting escalation contacts and secondary on-call details.