The SRE team's runbook for triaging production latency and error-rate incidents. Use this whenever investigating an incident, a latency spike, elevated error rates, or when asked "what caused X" about a production service.
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---
name: incident-triage-runbook
description: The SRE team's runbook for triaging production latency and error-rate incidents. Use this whenever investigating an incident, a latency spike, elevated error rates, or when asked "what caused X" about a production service.
---
# Incident triage
If you change the order below, say why in #sre.
## Order of operations
1. Pull deploys for the last 6h. Don't open the log first.
2. Line the deploy timestamps up against `p99_latency_ms` / `error_rate` for the paged service. State the gap ("deploy 14:31, p99 moves 14:33").
3. If a deploy lines up: pull the diff, read it. Check for the stuff in the next section.
4. Then grep the log to confirm. Don't grep to fish.
5. No deploy lines up → check `db_pool_utilization` across checkout/cart/auth/inventory, then upstream deps.
## Things that have burned us
In rough order of how often:
- per-row query where there used to be a batch
- cache decorator removed "temporarily"
- new query, no index
- blocking call in an async handler
- retry loop with no backoff
## Write-up
One line at the bottom:
> **Root cause:** `<sha>` — one sentence on the mechanism.
If it wasn't a deploy, put the component or upstream dep where the sha goes (`db-primary`, `stripe-api`, whatever). Still one sentence.
Everything above that line is evidence. Keep it short; the long version goes in the postmortem doc.
