10 The Emergency Playbook
This chapter covers
- What an Emergency Playbook is and whether your team should use one
- How to properly create an Emergency Playbook and put it into practice
Despite your best intentions, emergency situations will occur that don’t fit neatly into the established process. How do you deal with these taunting and troublesome incidents? More importantly, how do you determine whether a situation warrants bypassing your team’s process? These questions can be answered with something like an Emergency Playbook.
10.1 What is an Emergency Playbook?
An Emergency Playbook is usually a collection of formal steps, actions, and decisions that can be taken during an emergency situation where there is no other choice but to bypass the process. Usually, hotfixes to patch a production problem quickly generate the need for an emergency response.
Sometimes, Emergency Playbooks are called runbooks, although they are not completely the same. You may also know them as Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), a common tool businesses use to ensure consistency and quality in the completion of a task. They are also “break glass” procedures, analogous to the glass boxes you literally break in case of an emergency. Those who have ever been on call or know on-call engineers likely also recognize Emergency Playbooks; they may have used one during their shift.