The On-Call Runbook Every Small Team Needs
The 3am incident is not the time to figure out your process. A runbook is a pre-written guide that tells your on-call engineer exactly what to do when they're groggy, stressed, and staring at a red dashboard.
You don't need a team of 50 to have a solid incident response process. Here's a lightweight runbook template that works for teams of 2–10 engineers.
What a runbook is (and is not)
A runbook is not a troubleshooting guide for every possible failure. It's a checklist for the first 30 minutes of an incident — the period where teams most often make mistakes.
The 5-step incident response framework
1. Acknowledge (0–2 min) — Claim the incident. Post in your team channel.
2. Assess (2–5 min) — What's actually broken? Check your monitoring dashboard.
3. Communicate (5 min) — Update your status page with 'Investigating'.
4. Mitigate (5–30 min) — Get to a working state as fast as possible.
5. Document (post-incident) — Write a blameless postmortem within 48 hours.
Severity levels for small teams
SEV1 — Production is down. Wake up on-call. Update status page. Escalate immediately.
SEV2 — Degraded. Handle during business hours.
SEV3 — Minor. Ticket and schedule fix.
Who to wake up and when
- On-call engineer: first responder for all SEV1/SEV2 - Engineering lead: escalate if not resolved in 30 minutes - CTO/VP: escalate for extended SEV1 or data breach
Tools and quick commands
# Check recent deploy git log --oneline -10 origin/main
# Roll back git revert HEAD && git push
# Restart API docker compose restart api
# Check error logs docker compose logs --tail=100 api | grep ERROR ```
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