oncall-runbook
GitHub用于为服务编写完整的值班运行手册，涵盖告警定义、升级路径、常见故障响应及交接流程。旨在帮助值班工程师快速定位问题并执行操作，降低平均修复时间（MTTR），确保夜间或紧急情况下能独立、自信地处理警报。
触发场景
安装
npx skills add mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills --skill oncall-runbook -g -y
SKILL.md
Frontmatter
{
"name": "oncall-runbook",
"description": "Write an on-call runbook for a service — covering alert definitions, escalation paths, common incident responses, and on-call handoff procedures. Use when asked to write an on-call guide, create alert runbooks, document escalation procedures, or prepare an on-call handoff document. Produces a structured on-call runbook with per-alert response procedures, escalation matrix, diagnostic commands, and handoff template."
}
On-Call Runbook Skill
Produce a complete on-call runbook for a service — giving the on-call engineer everything they need to respond confidently to alerts at 3am, without having to ask anyone for help.
A good on-call runbook reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) by eliminating the "what do I do first?" problem. It is written for the on-call engineer who has just been paged and needs to act, not for someone calmly reading documentation.
Required Inputs
Ask for these if not already provided:
- Service name and what it does
- Team and tech lead name
- Alert list — names of alerts that currently page on-call
- Monitoring setup — Datadog / Grafana / CloudWatch / PagerDuty / etc.
- Common failure modes — what breaks most often, and what fixes it
- Escalation contacts — who to call when on-call can't resolve it
- Deployment setup — can on-call roll back? How?
- Service dependencies — what does this service depend on, and what depends on it?
Output Format
On-Call Runbook: [Service Name]
Team: [Team name] | Tech lead: [Name] PagerDuty service: [Link] | Escalation policy: [Policy name] Last updated: [Date] | Next review: [Date + 90 days]
First time on-call for this service? Read the [developer onboarding doc] first — it covers the architecture and how things work. This runbook assumes you understand the service.
Quick Reference
Dashboard: [Link — the first thing to open when paged] Logs: [Link — where to find logs] Runbook index: Jump to the alert that paged you → [Alert list below] Can't resolve in 30 min? Escalate to: [Name] via [Slack / PagerDuty]
Rollback command (memorise this):
[rollback command — e.g. kubectl rollout undo deployment/[service-name]]
Escalation Matrix
| Situation | Escalate to | How | After how long |
|---|---|---|---|
| Can't diagnose the alert | [Tech lead name] | Slack DM / Phone | 30 minutes |
| Alert requires infra change | [Platform team] | #platform Slack |
Immediately |
| Customer-facing impact | [CSM / Support lead] | #incidents Slack |
Immediately (P1) |
| Database issue | [DBA or data team] | Slack / PagerDuty | Immediately |
| [Specific dependency] down | [[Dependency] on-call] | PagerDuty / Slack | Immediately |
| Extended outage (>1 hour) | [Engineering manager] | Phone | 1 hour |
Contacts:
| Name | Role | Slack | Phone |
|---|---|---|---|
| [Name] | Tech lead | @[handle] | [Number] |
| [Name] | Engineering manager | @[handle] | [Number] |
| [Name] | Platform / infra | @[handle] | [Number] |
| [Platform team] | Infra on-call | #platform |
PagerDuty |
Service Architecture (Quick View)
[Upstream callers]
│
▼
[This Service]
│
├──→ [Primary Database]
├──→ [Cache — e.g. Redis]
└──→ [Downstream Service / Queue]
If this service is down, these are affected: [List downstream consumers] If these are down, this service is affected: [List upstream dependencies]
Alert Runbooks
ALERT: [Alert Name 1 — e.g. HighErrorRate]
What it means: [Plain English — e.g. "More than 5% of API requests are returning 5xx errors in the last 5 minutes"] Severity: P1 / P2 / P3 SLO impact: Yes / No — [If yes: this alert means the error budget is burning at [X]× rate]
Step 1 — Acknowledge and assess
# Check current error rate
[query or dashboard link]
# Check which endpoints are erroring
[query or command]
Step 2 — Check recent changes
# Any deploys in the last hour?
[command or link to deployment log]
# Recent config changes?
[where to check]
Step 3 — Check dependencies
# Is the database healthy?
[health check command or link]
# Is [downstream service] healthy?
[health check command or link]
Step 4 — Diagnose
| If you see | It means | Do this |
|---|---|---|
| [Error pattern 1] | [Cause] | [Action] |
| [Error pattern 2] | [Cause] | [Action] |
| [Error pattern 3] | [Cause] | [Action] |
| No clear pattern | Unknown cause | Escalate to [name] |
Step 5 — Fix or mitigate
# If caused by bad deploy — roll back:
[rollback command]
# If caused by [specific issue]:
[fix command]
# If caused by upstream dependency:
[mitigation — e.g. enable circuit breaker, reduce traffic, etc.]
After resolving:
- Confirm error rate has returned to baseline
- Check no downstream services were affected
- If P1: open a post-incident review — see [incident-postmortem skill]
- Update
#incidentswith resolution summary
ALERT: [Alert Name 2 — e.g. HighLatency]
What it means: [e.g. "P99 response time has exceeded 1s for more than 3 consecutive minutes"] Severity: P1 / P2 / P3 SLO impact: Yes — latency SLO breach
Step 1 — Assess scope
# Check which endpoints are slow
[query or dashboard — broken down by endpoint]
# Check if latency is across all regions or localised
[query or command]
Step 2 — Common causes and fixes
| Cause | Signal | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Database slow queries | DB latency spike on dashboard | [Check slow query log: command] |
| Cache miss storm | Cache hit rate drops on dashboard | [command or action] |
| Memory pressure / GC | High memory on service dashboard | [command or action — e.g. restart, scale up] |
| Upstream service slow | Trace shows time in external call | Escalate to [service] on-call |
| Traffic spike | Request rate spike on dashboard | [Scale up: command] |
Step 3 — Escalate if unresolved in 20 minutes Page [Tech lead] via PagerDuty / Slack.
ALERT: [Alert Name 3 — e.g. DatabaseConnectionPoolExhausted]
What it means: [e.g. "The service has used all available database connections — new requests will fail"] Severity: P1 SLO impact: Yes — will cause errors immediately
Immediate mitigation:
# Restart the service to flush stale connections
[restart command]
# Check current connection count
[DB connection query]
Diagnose root cause after stabilising:
# Check for long-running queries holding connections
[query]
# Check if a recent deploy changed connection pool config
[where to check]
Resolution: [e.g. "Increase pool size in config / kill long-running queries / scale the service"]
ALERT: [Alert Name 4 — e.g. QueueBacklogHigh / ConsumerLag]
What it means: [e.g. "The message queue backlog exceeds 10,000 messages — consumers are not keeping up"] Severity: P2 SLO impact: Depends — if queue backs up, downstream systems will receive delayed data
Step 1 — Check consumer health
# Are consumers running?
[command]
# Consumer error rate?
[dashboard or query]
Step 2 — Check message contents
# Are there poison messages causing retries?
[command to inspect dead-letter queue or failed messages]
Step 3 — Options
| If | Then |
|---|---|
| Consumers are down | Restart consumers: [command] |
| Poison message in queue | Move to DLQ: [command] |
| Consumers healthy but slow | Scale consumers: [command] |
| Upstream producing too fast | Escalate to [upstream service] owner |
ALERT: [Add additional alerts following the same pattern]
Diagnostic Cheat Sheet
Common commands for quick diagnosis. Paste and run without modification.
# Service health
[health check command]
# Recent logs (last 100 lines)
[log command]
# Error logs only
[error log filter command]
# Current pod / instance status
[kubectl get pods / aws ecs describe-tasks / etc.]
# Restart the service
[restart command]
# Roll back to previous version
[rollback command]
# Database connection count
[DB query]
# Cache hit rate
[cache stats command]
# Current request rate
[metrics query]
Useful Dashboard Links
| Dashboard | URL | Use it to |
|---|---|---|
| Service overview | [Link] | First stop — error rate, latency, request rate |
| Database | [Link] | Connection count, slow queries, replication lag |
| Infrastructure | [Link] | CPU, memory, disk |
| Queue / consumers | [Link] | Backlog depth, consumer throughput |
| Upstream dependencies | [Link] | Dependency health at a glance |
Incident Communication
When you declare an incident:
Post to #incidents immediately:
🔴 INCIDENT — [Service Name]
Status: Investigating
Impact: [Who is affected and how]
Paged: [Your name]
Next update: [Time — max 30 min from now]
Update every 30 minutes while active:
🔴 UPDATE — [Service Name] — [Time]
Status: [Investigating / Identified / Mitigating / Resolved]
Latest: [One sentence on what you found or did]
Next update: [Time]
On resolution:
✅ RESOLVED — [Service Name] — [Time]
Duration: [X minutes]
Impact: [Summary of who was affected]
Cause: [One sentence]
Follow-up: [PIR required? Yes/No — link when created]
On-Call Handoff
Use this template at the end of every on-call shift:
--- ON-CALL HANDOFF: [Service Name] ---
Date: [Date]
Outgoing: [Your name]
Incoming: [Next on-call name]
INCIDENTS THIS SHIFT:
- [Incident summary — date, duration, cause, resolution, follow-up required]
OPEN ISSUES TO WATCH:
- [Anything not fully resolved / trending in the wrong direction]
CHANGES SINCE LAST HANDOFF:
- [Deploys, config changes, infra changes that affect on-call awareness]
RUNBOOK GAPS FOUND:
- [Anything you had to figure out that isn't documented — please add it]
ANYTHING ELSE:
- [Notes for incoming on-call]
Quality Checks
- Every alert that pages on-call has a runbook entry — no alert is missing
- Rollback command is accurate and tested recently
- Escalation contacts have current phone numbers and Slack handles
- Diagnostic commands work — they have been run by at least one person recently
- Handoff template is used at every shift change — not just during incidents
- "Things I had to figure out that weren't documented" are added to this runbook after every incident
Anti-Patterns
- Do not write alert runbooks with vague diagnostic steps like "check the logs" — every step must specify the exact command, dashboard link, or query to run
- Do not include an alert in the runbook that has no specific on-call action — an alert that pages someone with no defined response path creates panic, not resolution
- Do not leave the rollback command undocumented or untested — a rollback procedure that has never been run will fail when needed most
- Do not list escalation contacts without phone numbers and Slack handles — email-only escalation paths are useless during a 3am incident
- Do not write the runbook once and treat it as permanent — runbooks go stale after incidents; every incident must trigger a review of the relevant runbook entries
版本历史
- a38bc30 当前 2026-07-05 11:18
