Living document
Operations Runbook Template
Document your systems with a structure that supports on-call engineers, auditors, and future team members. Adapt the sections below to fit each platform you support.
What the template covers
- Ownership, contacts, and escalation paths.
- Service topology, dependencies, and monitoring.
- Deployment, rollback, and recovery procedures.
- Post-incident tasks and continuous improvement.
How we use it
Akadata retainers deliver this runbook with every managed system. It lives in Git, links to dashboards, and feeds our incident response. Feel free to fork it for your estate.
Download & adapt
- Service overview: Purpose, criticality, business owner.
- Contacts & escalation: Primary, secondary, vendor, on-call schedules.
- Architecture & dependencies: Diagram links, data stores, external integrations.
- Monitoring & alerting: Dashboards, key metrics, alert runbooks.
- Operational procedures: Deploy, rollback, backup, housekeeping tasks.
- Failure scenarios: Common incidents with symptoms, steps, and verification.
- Security & compliance: Access controls, logging, data classifications.
- Change & release management: Testing requirements, approvals, checklists.
- Post-incident review: Actions, owners, deadlines, metrics.
- Revision history: Date, author, summary of updates.
# service-info.yaml — copy to per-service directory
service:
name: ""
owner: ""
criticality: "low|medium|high"
business_owner: ""
description: ""
contacts:
primary:
name: ""
email: ""
phone: ""
secondary:
name: ""
email: ""
phone: ""
vendor:
name: ""
support_hours: ""
contract_ref: ""
dependencies:
- name: ""
type: "internal|external"
critical: true|false
monitoring:
dashboard_url: ""
pagerduty_service: ""
slo_target: "99.9%"
procedures:
deploy:
steps: []
duration: ""
rollback:
steps: []
duration: ""
backup:
schedule: ""
retention: ""- Update service overview: Verify purpose, owner, and criticality are current.
- Review contacts: Confirm primary, secondary, and vendor contact details.
- Check dependencies: Update diagram links, data store versions, integration endpoints.
- Validate monitoring: Test dashboards, alert rules, and pager integration.
- Test procedures: Run deploy, rollback, and backup drills. Record durations.
- Update failure scenarios: Add any new incident patterns with remediation steps.
- Review security: Confirm access controls, audit logs, and data classification.
- Record change: Log revision date, author, and summary in revision history.
Implementation tips
- Version control
Store the runbook in version control with pull requests for changes.
- Link dashboards
Link dashboards, alert definitions, and scripts directly in the document.
- Automate reminders
Use automation (e.g., GitHub Actions) to remind owners when updates are due.
Need support?
Our technical support retainers include runbook creation and maintenance. Talk to us if you want Akadata to author or review your documentation.
Talk to us