Incident Response

Structured workflow for diagnosing and resolving production incidents.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

• An alert has fired
• Users report issues
• Monitoring shows anomalies
• System behavior is unexpected
• You're the on-call responder

Incident Response Phases

Phase 1: Triage (First 5 minutes)

Goal: Assess severity and impact.

Quick Assessment Questions

1. What is broken? (service, feature, infrastructure)
2. Who is affected? (all users, subset, internal only)
3. When did it start? (correlate with deployments/changes)
4. Is it getting worse? (check error rate trend)

Severity Classification

Severity	Impact	Response
SEV1	Complete outage, all users affected	All hands, exec notification
SEV2	Major feature broken, many users affected	Primary + backup on-call
SEV3	Minor feature broken, some users affected	Primary on-call
SEV4	No user impact, potential issue	Next business day

Phase 2: Context Gathering (5-15 minutes)

Goal: Collect data to understand the problem.

Kubernetes Context

# Cluster health overview
kubectl get nodes
kubectl get pods -A | grep -v Running | grep -v Completed

# Recent events
kubectl get events -A --sort-by='.lastTimestamp' | tail -30

# Check specific service
kubectl get pods -l app=<service-name> -o wide
kubectl logs -l app=<service-name> --tail=100

Recent Changes

# Recent deployments
kubectl get deployments -A -o custom-columns=\
'NAMESPACE:.metadata.namespace,NAME:.metadata.name,UPDATED:.metadata.creationTimestamp' \
| sort -k3 -r | head -10

# Git history (if in repo)
git log --oneline --since="2 hours ago"

Metrics Check

# If Prometheus available
# Check error rates, latency, traffic

# If CloudWatch
aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics \
  --namespace <namespace> \
  --metric-name <metric> \
  --start-time $(date -u -v-1H +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ) \
  --end-time $(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ) \
  --period 60 \
  --statistics Average

Phase 3: Diagnosis (15-30 minutes)

Goal: Identify root cause.

Common Root Causes

1. Recent deployment - Check if timing correlates
2. Resource exhaustion - CPU, memory, disk, connections
3. External dependency failure - Database, API, DNS
4. Configuration change - ConfigMaps, secrets, feature flags
5. Traffic spike - Unexpected load
6. Certificate/credential expiry - Auth failures
7. Infrastructure issue - Node failure, network partition

Diagnosis Decision Tree

Is there a recent deployment?
├── Yes → Check deployment logs, consider rollback
└── No → Continue

Are pods crashing?
├── Yes → Check logs: kubectl logs <pod> --previous
└── No → Continue

Are resources exhausted?
├── Yes → Scale up or optimize
└── No → Continue

Is an external dependency failing?
├── Yes → Check dependency status, implement fallback
└── No → Continue

Is there a traffic spike?
├── Yes → Scale up, enable rate limiting
└── No → Escalate for deeper investigation

Phase 4: Mitigation (ASAP)

Goal: Restore service, even if root cause unknown.

Quick Mitigations

Rollback Deployment:

# Kubernetes rollback
kubectl rollout undo deployment/<name> -n <namespace>
kubectl rollout status deployment/<name> -n <namespace>

Scale Up:

# Increase replicas
kubectl scale deployment/<name> --replicas=5 -n <namespace>

Restart Pods:

# Rolling restart
kubectl rollout restart deployment/<name> -n <namespace>

Toggle Feature Flag:

# If feature flags available, disable problematic feature

Redirect Traffic:

# If multiple regions, redirect away from affected region

Phase 5: Communication

Goal: Keep stakeholders informed.

Status Update Template

**Incident Update - [SERVICE] - [SEV LEVEL]**

**Status:** Investigating / Identified / Mitigating / Resolved
**Impact:** [Who/what is affected]
**Start Time:** [When it started]
**Current Actions:** [What we're doing]
**Next Update:** [When to expect next update]

---
Incident Commander: [Name]

Communication Cadence

Severity	Update Frequency
SEV1	Every 15 minutes
SEV2	Every 30 minutes
SEV3	Every hour
SEV4	End of day

Phase 6: Resolution

Goal: Confirm service is restored.

Verification Checklist

• Error rates returned to baseline
• Latency returned to baseline
• All pods healthy
• Synthetic monitors passing
• User reports have stopped

Close Incident

**Incident Resolved - [SERVICE]**

**Duration:** [Start] to [End] ([X] minutes)
**Root Cause:** [Brief description]
**Resolution:** [What fixed it]
**Follow-ups:** [Links to action items]

Post-mortem scheduled: [Date/Time]

Post-Incident

Post-Mortem Template

# Incident Post-Mortem: [Title]

**Date:** [Date]
**Duration:** [Duration]
**Severity:** [SEV Level]
**Authors:** [Names]

## Summary
[2-3 sentence summary]

## Impact
- Users affected: [Number/percentage]
- Revenue impact: [If applicable]
- SLA impact: [If applicable]

## Timeline
- HH:MM - [Event]
- HH:MM - [Event]
- HH:MM - [Event]

## Root Cause
[Detailed explanation]

## Resolution
[How it was fixed]

## Lessons Learned
### What went well
- [Item]

### What could be improved
- [Item]

## Action Items
- [ ] [Action] - Owner: [Name] - Due: [Date]
- [ ] [Action] - Owner: [Name] - Due: [Date]

Quick Reference

Essential Commands

# Quick cluster health
kubectl get nodes && kubectl get pods -A | grep -v Running

# Service status
kubectl get pods,svc,endpoints -l app=<service>

# Recent events
kubectl get events --sort-by='.lastTimestamp' | tail -20

# Quick logs
kubectl logs -l app=<service> --tail=50 --all-containers

Escalation Contacts

Document your escalation path:

1. Primary on-call
2. Secondary on-call
3. Team lead
4. Engineering manager
5. VP Engineering (SEV1 only)

Related Skills

• k8s-debug: For Kubernetes-specific debugging
• log-analysis: For log pattern analysis
• argocd-gitops: For GitOps rollbacks