The Ultimate Incident Response Playbook

The 5 Stages of Incident Response

Every incident follows a predictable lifecycle. The best teams have a playbook for each stage.

1. Detection

Automated monitoring catches the issue. UptimeGuard sends alerts within 30 seconds of detecting a problem.

Key metrics to monitor:

• HTTP status codes (5xx errors)
• Response time (p95 and p99)
• SSL certificate expiry
• DNS resolution time

2. Triage

Assess severity and impact:

Severity	Impact	Response Time
P1	All users affected	Immediate
P2	Major feature down	15 minutes
P3	Minor degradation	1 hour
P4	Cosmetic issue	Next sprint

3. Communication

Update your status page and notify stakeholders. Clear communication reduces support ticket volume by up to 60%.

## Incident Update — API Latency

**Status:** Investigating
**Impact:** API response times elevated (p95 > 2s)
**Started:** 2025-11-01 14:32 UTC

We are investigating elevated API latency.
No data loss has occurred. Updates every 15 minutes.

4. Resolution

Deploy the fix, verify the recovery, and confirm all checks are green.

5. Post-Mortem

Document what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it. Blameless post-mortems lead to better systems.

Building Your Playbook

Every team should have documented runbooks for common failure scenarios. UptimeGuard's incident timeline feature makes it easy to reconstruct events during post-mortems.

Template: Incident Post-Mortem

• Date: YYYY-MM-DD
• Duration: X hours Y minutes
• Impact: Description of user impact
• Root Cause: What actually broke
• Timeline: Minute-by-minute reconstruction
• Action Items: Preventive measures with owners and deadlines