Incident Response Runbook Creation AI Prompt
Incidents hit at the worst times—and disorganized responses make them worse. Vague steps, unclear owners, and missing escalation paths lead to delays and confusion. You need a runbook that tells people exactly what to do, when to do it, and how to hand off.
A strong prompt turns scattered knowledge into a precise, action-ready runbook. With clear roles, SLAs, tools, and decision points, your team moves in lockstep under pressure. AskSmarter.ai guides you with targeted questions to capture the context you’d forget—like communication templates, rollback steps, and edge cases—then builds a structured prompt that delivers.
Use the example below to produce a reliable, step-by-step incident response runbook that reduces downtime and stress while improving auditability and training.
The transformation
Before — Vague prompt
Make an incident response plan for outages with steps and best practices.
After — Optimized prompt
You are an experienced SRE lead. Create a step-by-step incident response runbook for “Production API latency spike.”
- Audience: on-call engineers, incident commander, comms lead
- Environment: AWS, Kubernetes, Datadog, PagerDuty, Slack
- SLAs: detect <2 min, mitigate <15 min, resolve <60 min
- Structure: overview, severity matrix, roles, trigger conditions, investigation checklist, mitigation playbook, rollback steps, comms templates (internal/external), decision tree, escalation paths, post-incident actions
- Constraints: plain language, numbered steps, time stamps, checkboxes, copy-ready Slack/Status Page text, links placeholders
- Edge cases: partial region outage, noisy neighbor pod, third-party dependency degradation
- Output: 2 pages max, include RACI table and handoff protocol
Why this works
The optimized prompt outperforms the vague version by adding the context and structure operations teams need.
- Clarity: It names the exact incident type (“Production API latency spike”) and defines success with SLAs. Teams know what “good” looks like.
- Context: It specifies audience, tools (AWS, Kubernetes, Datadog, PagerDuty, Slack), and environment so steps map to real workflows.
- Structure: It demands a complete runbook layout—roles, severity matrix, checklists, decision tree, comms templates, and RACI—so nothing critical is missed.
- Tone and format: It requests plain language, timestamps, numbered steps, and copy-ready messages, increasing usability during high-stress events.
- Edge cases: It includes likely failure modes to prevent dead-ends and rework.
AskSmarter.ai gets you here by asking targeted questions about audience, SLAs, tools, constraints, and failure scenarios. That guided intake produces a precise, action-oriented prompt that yields a practical runbook on the first try, cutting incident confusion and speeding resolution.
When to use this prompt
SRE Managers
Standardize runbooks across services so on-call engineers follow consistent steps with clear SLAs and escalation paths.
Product Managers
Document incident communication flows and customer impact updates for major feature launches with minimal downtime risk.
Customer Success Leaders
Prepare ready-to-send outage updates and FAQs to reduce support volume during high-severity incidents.
Engineers On Call
Use a clear investigation and mitigation checklist that matches your monitoring and deployment tools.
IT Operations Directors
Create audit-ready, repeatable processes for compliance reviews and post-incident reporting.
Pro tips
- 1
Define measurable SLAs to anchor urgency and guide escalation timing.
- 2
List the exact tools and integrations so the runbook references real commands and dashboards.
- 3
Specify communication templates and channels to cut delays and keep messaging consistent.
- 4
Include 2-3 probable edge cases to avoid stalls when the main path doesn’t fit.
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Build a prompt for your situation
This example shows the pattern. AskSmarter.ai guides you to create prompts tailored to your specific context, audience, and goals.