DevOps and incidents templates
Incident comms, on-call, deploys, maintenance windows, runbooks and SRE notes. 49 free templates, 8 of them longer notes. Open one to fill in the blanks and copy it.
Incident communication
Clear updates under pressure.
- Incident declared Snippet Opens an incident. 🚨 Incident declared: [Title] Severity: SEV1 Impact: [Impact] Incident lead: [Lead] Channel: [Channel]
- Status page: investigating Snippet Public first update. Investigating: We are investigating reports of [Symptom] affecting [Service]. Next update in 15 minutes.
- Status page: identified Snippet Cause found. Identified: The issue is caused by [Cause]. We are working on a fix.
- Status page: monitoring Snippet Fix deployed. Monitoring: A fix has been deployed and [Service] is recovering. We are monitoring closely.
- Status page: resolved Snippet All clear. Resolved: [Service] has been operating normally since [time now]. We will publish a summary within 5 days.
- Internal incident update Snippet Update for staff. Update [Number] on [Title] What we know: [Known] What we are doing: [Doing] Customer impact: [Impact] Next…
- Executive incident summary Snippet For leadership. [Title]: ongoing. Impact: [Impact]. Customers affected: [Customers]. Cause: [Cause]. ETA to fix: [ETA].
- Customer incident email Snippet Direct note to customers. Hi [Customer], On [today], [Service] was unavailable for [Duration] because [Cause]. Your data was not…
- Incident roles Snippet Assigns roles. Incident lead: [Lead] Comms: [Comms] Ops: [Ops] Scribe: [Scribe]
- Incident closed Snippet Closes the incident. ✅ Incident [Title] closed at [time now]. Postmortem owner: [Owner], due [in 5 days].
On-call
Rotations, pages and handovers.
- Page acknowledgement Snippet Acknowledges an alert. Ack. Looking at [Alert] now.
- Escalation page Snippet Escalates to someone. @[Person] escalating [Alert]: [Summary]. I need help with [Help].
- On-call handover Snippet End of shift. On-call handover Incidents: [Incidents] Ongoing: [Ongoing] Silenced alerts: [Silenced] Notes:
- Rotation swap request Snippet Swaps a shift. Could anyone swap on-call with me for [Dates]? I can take [Your dates] in return.
- Noisy alert ticket Snippet Tunes an alert. Alert [Alert] fired [Count] times this week, all false positives. Proposal: [Change].
- Alert description Snippet What an alert means. What it means: [Meaning] Why it matters: [Why] First steps: [Steps] Runbook: [Link]
Deploys and maintenance
Changes to production.
- Deploy notice Snippet Before a deploy. Deploying [Service] [Version] at [time now]. Expected impact: none.
- Deploy complete Snippet After deploy. ✅ [Service] [Version] deployed. Watching dashboards for 30 minutes.
- Rollback notice Snippet Rolling back. ⏪ Rolling back [Service] to [Version] because [Reason].
- Maintenance window Snippet Planned downtime notice. Planned maintenance: [Service] on [today] from [Start] to [End] [Time zone]. Expected impact: [Impact].
- Change approval request Snippet CAB request. Change: [Change] Risk: low Window: [Window] Rollback: [Rollback] Approver: [Approver]
- Certificate expiry Snippet TLS cert reminder. The TLS certificate for [Domain] expires on [Expiry]. Owner: [Owner]. Renew by [in 7 days].
- Database migration notice Snippet Heads-up on a migration. Running migration [Migration] on [Database] at [time now]. Expected duration: [Duration]. Writes continue…
- Freeze exception Snippet Asks to ship during a freeze. Requesting a freeze exception for [Change]: [Reason]. Risk: [Risk]. Tested: [Tests].
SRE notes
Runbooks, reviews and capacity.
- Incident postmortem Note Blameless review. Incident: [Incident] Date: [today] Severity: SEV1 Duration: [Duration] Impact Timeline (UTC) - Root cause…
- Runbook Note Operational procedure. Service: [Service] Alert: [Alert] Symptoms Diagnose 1. Fix 1. Escalate to
- Service overview Note One service. Service: [Service] Owner: [Owner] Tier: 1 What it does Dependencies - Dashboards - SLOs
- SLO definition Note Reliability target. Service: [Service] SLI: [SLI] Target: [Target] over 30 days Error budget: [Budget] Policy when budget is spent
- Capacity plan Note Plan for growth. Service: [Service] Current usage Growth forecast Limits Actions - [ ]
- Game day plan Note Chaos exercise. Scenario: [Scenario] Date: [today] Hypothesis Steps 1. Abort criteria Findings
- On-call review Note Weekly review. Week of [today] Pages: [Pages] Incidents: [Incidents] Top noise - Improvements - [ ]
- Disaster recovery plan Note DR summary. Recovery objectives RTO: [RTO] RPO: [RPO] Backups Restore steps 1. Last tested [today]
Cloud and infra snippets
Commands for daily ops.
- AWS whoami Snippet Check credentials. aws sts get-caller-identity
- AWS list S3 Snippet List a bucket. aws s3 ls s3://[Bucket]/[Prefix]
- AWS copy to S3 Snippet Upload a file. aws s3 cp [File] s3://[Bucket]/[Key]
- Terraform plan Snippet Plan changes. terraform init && terraform plan -out=tfplan
- Terraform apply Snippet Apply a plan. terraform apply tfplan
- Kubernetes rollout restart Snippet Restart pods. kubectl rollout restart deployment/[Deployment] -n [Namespace]
- Kubernetes describe pod Snippet Debug a pod. kubectl describe pod [Pod] -n [Namespace]
- Kubernetes port forward Snippet Local access. kubectl port-forward svc/[Service] [Local]:[Remote] -n [Namespace]
- Kubernetes scale Snippet Scale replicas. kubectl scale deployment/[Deployment] replicas=3 -n [Namespace]
- Check disk space Snippet Disk usage on a server. df -h
- Check memory Snippet Memory on Linux. free -h
- Top processes Snippet CPU hogs. ps aux sort=-%cpu | head -10
- Systemd status Snippet Service status. systemctl status [Service]
- Journal logs Snippet Service logs. journalctl -u [Service] -f since "10 minutes ago"
- Test a TCP port Snippet Connectivity check. nc -zv [Host] [Port]
- DNS lookup Snippet Resolve a name. dig +short [Domain]
- TLS certificate expiry Snippet Check a cert. echo | openssl s_client -servername [Domain] -connect [Domain]:443 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -dates