Create Incident Response System

[adriandarian]

Create system for detecting, responding to, and learning from incidents.

Details

Comprehensive incident management covering detection, response, resolution, and post-mortems.

System Components

• Incident detection and alerting
• On-call rotation management
• Incident communication hub
• Runbook automation
• Post-mortem templates
• Incident analytics

Incident Detection

Automated Monitors

• CI/CD failure rate spike
• Production error rate increase
• Performance degradation
• Security vulnerability disclosed
• Service downtime
• Dependency failure
• Disk/memory/CPU alerts

Manual Triggers

• User reports via GitHub issue
• Community reports
• Internal team detection
• Security researcher report

Severity Levels

SEV-1: Critical

• Complete service outage
• Data breach / security incident
• Critical security vulnerability
• Affects all users
• Immediate response required

SEV-2: High

• Major feature broken
• Significant performance degradation
• Affects many users
• Response within 1 hour

SEV-3: Medium

• Minor feature broken
• Moderate performance issue
• Affects some users
• Response within 4 hours

SEV-4: Low

• Minor bug
• Low-impact issue
• Affects few users
• Response within 24 hours

Incident Response Process

1. Detection & Alert

   • Monitor detects issue
   • Alert sent to on-call
   • Incident ticket created
   • Status page updated

2. Initial Response

   • Acknowledge incident
   • Assess severity
   • Notify stakeholders
   • Form incident team

3. Investigation

   • Identify root cause
   • Gather logs and metrics
   • Test hypotheses
   • Document findings

4. Mitigation

   • Apply immediate fix
   • Deploy hotfix if needed
   • Verify resolution
   • Monitor for recurrence

5. Recovery

   • Restore full service
   • Verify all systems healthy
   • Update status page
   • Notify stakeholders

6. Post-Mortem

   • Document timeline
   • Identify root cause
   • Action items for prevention
   • Share learnings

On-Call Management

Rotation Schedule

• Primary on-call
• Secondary backup
• Weekly rotations
• Timezone coverage
• Holiday coverage

On-Call Tools

• PagerDuty / Opsgenie
• Escalation policies
• Contact methods
• Runbook access

Communication

Internal

• Slack incident channel
• Status updates every 30min
• Stakeholder notifications
• Team coordination

External

• Status page updates
• GitHub issue updates
• Twitter/social media
• Email notifications

Runbooks

Create runbooks for:

• Common failure scenarios
• Emergency procedures
• System architecture
• Access credentials
• Contact information
• Escalation paths

Post-Mortem Template

# Incident Post-Mortem

## Summary
[Brief description of incident]

## Impact
- Duration: X hours
- Users affected: Y
- Services impacted: Z

## Timeline
- HH:MM - Event 1
- HH:MM - Event 2
...

## Root Cause
[Detailed analysis]

## Resolution
[How it was fixed]

## Action Items
- [ ] Action 1 - Owner - Due date
- [ ] Action 2 - Owner - Due date

## Lessons Learned
[What we learned]

## Prevention
[How to prevent recurrence]

Incident Analytics

Metrics Tracked

• MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
• MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery)
• MTTI (Mean Time To Identify)
• MTTM (Mean Time To Mitigate)
• Incident frequency
• Severity distribution
• Time to acknowledgement

Reports

• Monthly incident summary
• Trend analysis
• Common patterns
• Improvement opportunities

Acceptance Criteria

• Detection systems operational
• Alerting reaching on-call
• Communication channels setup
• Runbooks comprehensive
• Post-mortem process defined
• Analytics dashboard working
• Status page integrated
• On-call schedule active
• Documentation complete
• Tested with simulated incidents