On-Call Runbooks for Uptime Incidents
Ship short, actionable runbooks that stop downtime fast.
By Priya DesaiSRE Lead•Published November 15, 2025•5 min read
Keep them short
Make runbooks skimmable with checklists for restart, rollback, and feature flag disable.
Include owner names and Slack channels on page one.
Integrate with monitors
Link runbooks directly from alerts and synthetic monitors.
Embed screenshots or commands to validate fixes.
Core runbook items
- Expected symptoms
- Rollback steps
- Customer communication note
Evolve after incidents
Add timelines and root causes after each incident to train new responders.
Retire steps that did not help to keep them lean.
Article stats
- Author: Priya Desai
- Role: SRE Lead
- Published: November 15, 2025
- Reading time: 5 min
Tags
#runbooks#incident response#uptime
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