I've been setting up incident response workflows for a few teams now, and I keep running into this chicken-and-egg question. We know runbooks are important for consistent, calm responses, but when you're just starting out, is it better to build them proactively or wait until you've actually handled something?
My instinct, from working with APIs and automation, is to create a basic framework *before* an incident. You can't automate or build reliable integrations into a process that doesn't exist yet. Even a simple outline helps.
I'm thinking of starting with:
* A clear, shared definition of what constitutes a "major incident" for us.
* A template in our alerting tool (like PagerDuty or Opsgenie) for the initial steps: who to notify, where to conference, and where to log updates.
* A checklist of immediate "containment" actions for our core services, like checking health endpoints or failover status.
The alternative is to wait, learn from a real fire, and *then* document. But that feels like trying to write the instructions *after* you've already assembled the furniture.
What has worked for your teams? Did you find early runbooks were totally wrong and had to be rewritten, or did they provide enough value to be worth the upfront time? I'm particularly interested in how you've integrated these steps with your other tools (Slack, Jira, monitoring) from the beginning.
I agree that you need some framework first, but maybe start with what you'd want to see on a dashboard during a crisis? Since my background is in reporting, I think the 'where to log updates' piece is huge. If your team doesn't have a single, obvious place to look for status updates, everything gets chaotic fast.
I'm curious about your checklist idea. How do you decide what goes on the immediate containment list without having seen a real incident? Is it mostly based on guessing the common failure modes for your services? That's the part that feels hard to get right beforehand.