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Write a runbook for someone woken at 3am
An alert exists and the only person who knows what to do is on holiday.
Longrunbookoncalloperations
Write an on-call runbook for the alert below, for a responder who did not build this system and is half awake. Structure: 1. **What this alert means**, one sentence, plus what users are experiencing right now. 2. **Severity call**: how to decide in under a minute whether this needs escalation or can wait until morning. 3. **First checks**, in order, each with the exact command or dashboard link and what a healthy result looks like. 4. **Most likely causes**, ranked by frequency, each with its confirming check and its fix. 5. **Mitigations** that buy time without fixing the cause: restart, scale, disable a feature flag, fail over. State the side effects of each. 6. **Escalation**: who to wake, and the threshold for waking them. 7. **After**: what to capture for the follow-up while it is still happening. No step may require judgement the responder does not have. Where a step is destructive, mark it clearly. Alert and system:
Making it yours
- Paste your own material where the prompt asks for it. Everything above that line is instruction, not content.
- Delete any rule that does not apply to you. A shorter prompt that fits beats a thorough one that does not.
- If the answer comes back vague, add a line saying what you do not want. Constraints work better than encouragement.
Runbooks and support. What to do at 3am, the failures that keep arriving, and the limits nobody wrote down.
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