Runbooks & Documentation

Summary

Step-by-step guides for handling known operational tasks or incident types — turning tribal knowledge (only in one person's head) into something any on-call engineer can follow at 3am.

• 1Write a runbook for a common operational task (e.g. restarting a stuck service).
• 2Learn why a runbook should be specific and step-by-step, not a vague general description.
• 3Practice keeping a runbook updated as the underlying system or process changes.