runbook

Definitions

1. A documented set of step-by-step procedures for handling specific operational scenarios, from routine maintenance tasks to incident response. Runbooks reduce the cognitive load on on-call engineers by providing pre-written, tested procedures. The best runbooks include decision trees, exact commands to run, and criteria for escalation.

   In plain English: A step-by-step instruction manual for handling common operational problems, so the person on-call at 3am doesn't have to figure everything out from scratch.

   Example: The new on-call engineer resolved the disk space alert in ten minutes by following the runbook, instead of panicking at 3am like I did my first time.

Related Terms

• On-Call
• postmortem
• Blameless Postmortem
• Incident Management
• Monitoring
• Runbook