A good runbook is the difference between a 5-minute incident and a 50-minute one. The best ones are short, scannable, and written by the engineer who just lived through the failure. Use this free runbook template as your structure, and use Guidyy to record the resolution as you do it — so the next on-call who hits the same alert doesn't start from scratch.
Free Tool
Free Runbook Template & Generator for On-Call Teams
A battle-tested runbook template for incident response, plus a 60-second generator to turn your last fix into a runbook for next time.
01
The runbook template
Use this structure for every alert that pages a human. Short is better than complete; the on-call needs the first useful action in under 30 seconds.
- Alert name — match the PagerDuty / Opsgenie title exactly
- Symptoms — what the on-call will see
- Immediate triage — first 3 commands to run
- Likely causes (ranked) — most common first
- Resolution steps — for each likely cause
- Escalation — who to page if triage fails
- Post-incident — what to capture for the post-mortem
02
How to generate the Resolution section automatically
Next time you resolve the alert, hit record in Guidyy as you work. When you're done, paste the embed in the Resolution section. The runbook is now battle-tested, screenshot-accurate, and replayable.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between a runbook and an SOP?+
SOPs document routine business processes (e.g., onboarding a vendor). Runbooks document operational responses (e.g., what to do when the API errors). Both fit cleanly into Guidyy.
Should every alert have a runbook?+
Every page-the-human alert should. Lower-priority alerts can live with a quick comment in the alert config.
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