Incident Runbook Templates
Write structured incident response runbooks with steps, escalation paths and recovery actions
- Repository
- wshobson/agents
- Stars
- 42,095
- Licence
- MIT
- Files
- 2 files
What it does
This skill gives the AI agent a standard structure for writing incident response runbooks, the step-by-step guides teams use when a production system breaks. Once installed, the agent organises a runbook into sections such as impact, detection, triage, mitigation, rollback, communication and escalation, and writes steps that are meant to be followed under stress. It also suggests practical habits like prerequisite checks, quick checklists, and clear rollback steps.
Great for
- On-call or platform engineers drafting or updating runbooks for a service
- Team leads standardising severity levels and escalation matrices across teams
- Engineers onboarding new on-call staff who need clear recovery guides
Skip it if
- Responding to a live outage in real time: the skill writes documents, it does not diagnose systems, and its example commands must be checked against your own environment before anyone runs them
- Organisations that need a certified incident management framework, since the templates are generic examples and not tied to any compliance standard
Try asking
- “Create a runbook for a payment processing service outage, including severity levels and an escalation matrix”
- “Write a database runbook covering connection pool exhaustion and replication lag with rollback steps”
- “Draft a 15-minute stakeholder update template for our incident communicator role”
- “Turn our existing messy outage notes into a structured runbook with a quick checklist”
Install in 3 steps
- 1
Download the skill
The ZIP contains the 2 original files, the MIT licence and an attribution note.
incident-runbook-templates.zip - 2
Add it to your agent
Claude Code (all projects)
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && unzip incident-runbook-templates.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/Claude Code / Agent SDK (this project only)
mkdir -p .claude/skills && unzip incident-runbook-templates.zip -d .claude/skills/Claude apps (web/desktop): Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, and choose the ZIP.
- 3
Ask for the task
No special command needed — the agent reads the skill's description and loads it when your request matches. Try one of the prompts above.
Get better results
- Give the agent your real service names, dashboards, cluster names and severity definitions so the runbook matches your environment instead of generic placeholders.
- Always test every command in the generated runbook in a non-production environment and check that the example commands, such as cluster names and endpoints, are correct before relying on them.
- Ask for a Last Verified date and owner in the runbook metadata, and schedule a review after each SEV1 or SEV2 incident.
What's inside
- references/details.md
- SKILL.md
Redistributed unmodified from wshobson/agents under the MIT licence. The assessment was drafted with AI from the skill's files on 2026-10-29. Skills can instruct your agent to run code — read SKILL.md and any scripts before installing.