Why Your Dev Team Needs Better Incident Playbooks
When your production system is on fire, your team shouldn't be asking, "What do we do now?" They should be flipping open a well-crafted playbook. But the truth? Most teams don't even have one. Or worse, they have a dusty Notion doc no one's looked at since onboarding.
What is an Incident Playbook?
A playbook is a clear, actionable guide that walks responders through common failure scenarios — what to check, who to notify, and when to escalate. It should be:
- 🔁 Repeatable
- 📚 Easy to follow under pressure
- 💡 Updated regularly
Why You Need One (Even If You're Small)
You don't need a 24/7 ops team or thousands of customers to benefit from a playbook. Even a solo dev can save hours by outlining steps ahead of time for issues like:
- 500 errors from a key service
- Database connections maxing out
- Sudden traffic spikes or DDoS patterns
- Payments failing silently
How to Write a Good One
Every playbook should answer three questions:
- Detection: How will we know this incident has started?
- Diagnosis: What tools/logs/metrics help us figure it out?
- Resolution: Who does what, and in what order?
A Real Example
Here's an excerpt from one of our Redis outage playbooks:
📍 Incident: Redis Latency > 200ms
✅ Check:
- Is CPU > 80% on Redis container?
- Are slowlog entries spiking?
- Is key eviction happening?
🧠 If confirmed:
- Scale up memory tier
- Clear temp keys (use namespace prefix match)
📞 Notify #infra channel
Bonus: Automate What You Can
Use incident bots like FireHydrant or PagerDuty to kick off playbooks automatically. Even a simple Slack slash command like /incident start can set the wheels in motion.
Keep It Alive
The best playbook is a living document. After each incident, do a short retro: What worked? What was missing? Update the doc immediately.
Don't wait for chaos to force clarity. Prepare now — your future sleep-deprived self will thank you.