Incident Management Playbook: From Alert to Resolution in Minutes

When an alert fires at 2 AM, you don't want to be figuring out your process. You want a playbook.

Phase 1: Detection (Target: Under 1 Minute)

Automated monitoring checking every 30-60 seconds with multi-channel alerting.

Phase 2: Acknowledgment (Target: Under 5 Minutes)

Someone needs to own the incident. Assess severity:

• SEV1: Core service completely down
• SEV2: Significant feature broken
• SEV3: Non-critical feature degraded
• SEV4: Cosmetic or minor issue

Phase 3: Communication (Ongoing)

Update your status page within 5 minutes. Be specific: "Payment processing is currently unavailable" not "We're experiencing issues." Post updates every 15 minutes minimum.

Phase 4: Diagnosis

The 5-Step Diagnosis: What changed? What are the symptoms? What's the blast radius? What do the logs say? What do the metrics show?

Check these first: Recent deployment, database issues, third-party failures, DNS issues, certificate expiry, resource exhaustion.

Phase 5: Resolution

Priority: Mitigate first (rollback, restart, failover), then fix root cause, verify, and monitor for recurrence.

Phase 6: Post-Incident

Blameless post-mortem within 24 hours. Identify action items with owners and deadlines.

The best incident response is boring — it's a well-rehearsed routine, not a panicked scramble.