The Free Incident Management Runbook Your Team Will Actually Use
Runbooks rot when they’re verbose and detached from the tools you actually touch during an outage. This free incident management runbook keeps it stripped down to triggers, actions, and owners—all anchored on exit1.dev monitoring data.
Trigger table: decide in seconds
Document the obvious failure modes and the first move. Keep it in a simple table or Notion doc. Start with these exit1.dev signal categories:
| Trigger | Action | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| 2 consecutive 500s on checkout API | Flip traffic to secondary region runbook | Ops lead |
| Latency spikes >1s on auth | Roll back the last deployment | Engineering on-call |
| SSL expiry warning | Follow free SSL monitoring alerts guide | Platform lead |
| Third-party dependency down | Enable feature flag failsafe | Product engineer |
You can add nuance later. Right now you’re aiming for a fast response, not legalese.
Response timeline: own the first 15 minutes
The first 15 minutes decide whether you drown in chaos or regain control. Bake this flow into the runbook:
- Minute 0–1: exit1.dev alert hits Slack and email. Incident commander acknowledges.
- Minute 2–4: Ops lead validates scope via the dashboard’s regional breakdown.
- Minute 5–7: Post initial customer update using the template from the free uptime monitor email alerts guide.
- Minute 8–15: Execute mitigation, log each step in the incident channel, and loop the status page.
Evidence capture: zero guesswork postmortems
If you don’t capture evidence in real time, your postmortem becomes fiction. exit1.dev helps you grab:
- Alert history exports – timestamped detection and recovery.
- Log downloads – HTTP status codes, regional impacts.
- Analytics screenshots – uptime and latency charts for exec summaries.
Store them in the incident ticket immediately. Future you will thank present you when you revisit the event.
Runbook hygiene: iterate without ceremony
Review the runbook monthly. Compare it with real incidents and adjust. Fold in lessons from resources like the multi-region performance tuning guide to sharpen mitigation steps. Free incident management thrives on ruthless iteration, not bigger PDFs.
Send the signal: you take resilience seriously
Runbooks aren’t corporate theater. They tell your team and your customers you’re ready for impact. exit1.dev gives you the live data to make the runbook work. Document the steps, rehearse them, and you’ll ship with the confidence that when things break—and they will—you’re ready to slam the door on downtime.
Morten Pradsgaard is the founder of exit1.dev — the free uptime monitor for people who actually ship. He writes no-bullshit guides on monitoring, reliability, and building software that doesn't crumble under pressure.