← Back to trackModule: Observability + Incidents

ADVANCED · Hard · 60m

Incident response playbook

Platform Engineering Road

Lesson notes

Goal

Handle incidents calmly with a repeatable playbook.

The incident loop

detect (alert / report)
triage (scope + severity)
mitigate (stop bleeding)
recover (restore service)
learn (postmortem + fixes)

Triage checklist

what changed recently?
is it all users or one region?
is error rate rising or only latency?
is a dependency down?

Communication (simple rules)

one incident lead
update regularly (every 15-30 min)
write what you know + what you are doing next

Postmortem format

timeline
root cause
contributing factors
action items (owners + dates)

Next Step

Turn the playbook into runbooks and automate the common fixes.

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