Service Runbook Template

What This Service Does

One paragraph: what the service does, who depends on it, and what breaks if it goes down.

Health & Monitoring

# Health check
curl -s https://service.example.com/health | jq .

# Key metrics to watch
# - Request rate, error rate, latency (RED)
# - CPU, memory, disk, connections (USE)

Common Procedures

Restart

# Graceful restart (zero-downtime if behind load balancer)
# Adapt to your setup: systemctl, kubectl, docker, ECS

kubectl rollout restart deployment/service-name -n namespace

Scale

# Scale up
kubectl scale deployment/service-name --replicas=N -n namespace

# Verify
kubectl get pods -n namespace -l app=service-name

Check Logs

# Recent errors
kubectl logs -l app=service-name -n namespace --since=1h | grep -i error

# Or via centralized logging
# Link to Kibana/Loki/CloudWatch query: [paste link]

Database

# Check connections
SELECT count(*) FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE datname = 'dbname';

# Slow queries
SELECT query, calls, mean_exec_time FROM pg_stat_statements ORDER BY mean_exec_time DESC LIMIT 10;

Cache

# Clear cache (if safe)
redis-cli -h cache.example.com FLUSHDB

# Check memory
redis-cli -h cache.example.com INFO memory

Rollback

# Roll back to previous version
# Adapt: kubectl, helm, ECS, Vercel, etc.

kubectl rollout undo deployment/service-name -n namespace

# Verify
kubectl rollout status deployment/service-name -n namespace

Dependencies

Access & Secrets

Access procedure: who can grant emergency access, and how (Vault, AWS IAM, manual).

Escalation