Runbook

How it is used

Good alerts link to a runbook. Teams write, update and automate runbooks. 'Playbook' is used in a similar way, often for broader incident procedures. Runbooks are kept in wikis or in the code repository.

Example sentences

1. Follow the runbook for this alert: check the queue, then restart the worker pods.

2. The runbook was out of date, so the on-call engineer lost twenty minutes.

Common collocations

• follow the runbook
• update the runbook
• runbook link
• automated runbook

Related terms

• on-callAvailable outside normal hours to respond quickly if an alert or incident happens. Engineers take turns being on call for their services.
• alertAn automatic notification sent to engineers when a monitored value crosses a limit or something looks wrong, for example when the error rate is too high.
• incidentAn unplanned event that disrupts a service or makes it worse for users, such as an outage, a big slowdown or a data problem, and that needs a quick response.
• postmortemA written review after an incident that explains what happened, the impact, the timeline, the root cause and the actions that will stop it happening again.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• runbook · Software Engineering

More terms: Reliability and Incidents

• outage
• downtime
• uptime
• SLA
• root cause
• failover
• redundancy
• high availability
• disaster recovery
• SLO
• SRE