Incident Runbook Generator Skill

Incident Runbook Generator

Create actionable runbooks for common incidents.

Runbook Template

# Runbook: Database Connection Pool Exhausted

**Severity:** P1 (Critical)
**Estimated Time to Resolve:** 15-30 minutes
**Owner:** Database Team (On-call)

## Symptoms

- Application errors: "connection pool exhausted"
- Increased API latency (>5s)
- Failed health checks
- CloudWatch alarm: `DatabaseConnectionsHigh`

## Detection

- Alert: DatabaseConnectionPoolExhausted
- Metrics: `active_connections > max_connections * 0.9`
- Logs: "Error: connect ETIMEDOUT"

## Immediate Actions (5 min)

1. **Verify the issue**
   ```bash
   # Check current connections
   SELECT count(*) FROM pg_stat_activity;
   ```

Identify long-running queries

SELECT pid, now() - pg_stat_activity.query_start AS duration, query
FROM pg_stat_activity
WHERE state = 'active'
ORDER BY duration DESC
LIMIT 10;

Kill blocking queries (if safe)

SELECT pg_terminate_backend(pid)
FROM pg_stat_activity
WHERE state = 'idle in transaction'
AND now() - state_change > interval '5 minutes';

Mitigation (10 min)

Scale up connection pool (temporary)

# Update RDS parameter group
aws rds modify-db-parameter-group \
  --db-parameter-group-name prod-params \
  --parameters "ParameterName=max_connections,ParameterValue=200"

Restart application (if needed)
```
kubectl rollout restart deployment/api
```

Monitor recovery

watch -n 5 'psql -c "SELECT count(*) FROM pg_stat_activity;"'

Root Cause Investigation

Check for:

[ ] Recent deployment (new code with connection leaks)
[ ] Traffic spike (legitimate or DDoS)
[ ] Slow queries holding connections
[ ] Connection pool configuration too small
[ ] Application not releasing connections

Rollback Steps

If caused by deployment:

# Rollback to previous version
kubectl rollout undo deployment/api

# Verify
kubectl rollout status deployment/api

Communication Template

Initial (within 5 min):

🚨 INCIDENT: Database connection pool exhausted
Status: Investigating
Impact: API errors and slowness
ETA: 15-30 min
Next update: 10 min

Update (every 10 min):

UPDATE: Killed long-running queries
Status: Mitigating
Impact: Still degraded, improving
Actions: Scaling connection pool
Next update: 10 min

Resolution:

✅ RESOLVED: Database connections normalized
Duration: 25 minutes
Root cause: Connection leak in v2.3.4
Fix: Rolled back to v2.3.3
Follow-up: Bug fix PR #1234
Postmortem: [link]

Prevention

[ ] Add connection pool metrics to dashboards
[ ] Implement connection timeout (30s)
[ ] Add connection leak detection in tests
[ ] Set up pre-deployment load testing
[ ] Review connection pool sizing

Related Runbooks

Database High CPU
Slow Database Queries
Application OOM


## Output Checklist

- [ ] Symptoms documented
- [ ] Detection criteria
- [ ] Step-by-step actions
- [ ] Owner assigned
- [ ] Rollback procedure
- [ ] Communication templates
- [ ] Prevention measures
ENDFILE

Agent Skills: Incident Runbook Generator

Install this agent skill to your local

Skill Files