incident-triage-runbook

name	incident-triage-runbook
description	The SRE team's runbook for triaging production latency and error-rate incidents. Use this whenever investigating an incident, a latency spike, elevated error rates, or when asked "what caused X" about a production service.

Incident triage

If you change the order below, say why in #sre.

Order of operations

1. Pull deploys for the last 6h. Don't open the log first.
2. Line the deploy timestamps up against p99_latency_ms / error_rate for the paged service. State the gap ("deploy 14:31, p99 moves 14:33").
3. If a deploy lines up: pull the diff, read it. Check for the stuff in the next section.
4. Then grep the log to confirm. Don't grep to fish.
5. No deploy lines up → check db_pool_utilization across checkout/cart/auth/inventory, then upstream deps.

Things that have burned us

In rough order of how often:

• per-row query where there used to be a batch
• cache decorator removed "temporarily"
• new query, no index
• blocking call in an async handler
• retry loop with no backoff

Write-up

One line at the bottom:

Root cause: <sha> — one sentence on the mechanism.

If it wasn't a deploy, put the component or upstream dep where the sha goes (db-primary, stripe-api, whatever). Still one sentence.

Everything above that line is evidence. Keep it short; the long version goes in the postmortem doc.