Runbooks are the operational cousin of SOPs. Where an SOP documents a recurring business process ("how to onboard a new employee"), a runbook documents a recurring operational event ("what to do when the payments service errors"). Every alert that pages a human should have a linked runbook; without one, you're paying for senior-engineer triage time on every page.
Glossary
What is a Runbook?
A runbook is a step-by-step playbook for responding to a specific operational event — like an alert, an incident, or a scheduled maintenance task.
01
What a runbook includes
Alert name, symptoms, immediate triage commands, likely causes (ranked), resolution per cause, escalation path. Keep it short — the on-call doesn't have time to read a wiki page at 2am.
02
When to write a runbook
After the second occurrence of an alert. The first time is exploration; the second time, you write the runbook so the third time is a 30-second resolution.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Should runbooks be automated?+
When the resolution is deterministic, yes — promote it from a runbook to a script. But the runbook is the prerequisite: you can't safely automate what you haven't first documented.
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