How to Use Playbooks to Execute an Incident Recovery Plan

In today‘s always-on digital world, IT systems outages and cybersecurity incidents are an unfortunate reality that most organizations will face at some point. The potential costs of extended downtime are enormous – according to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is around $5,600 per minute, which extrapolates to over $300K per hour[^1]. And that‘s just the direct costs – the longer-term damage to customer trust and brand reputation can be even more severe.

While it‘s impossible to completely eliminate the risk of incidents, having a well-defined and tested incident recovery plan is essential for minimizing the impact when something does go wrong. One of the most effective tools for enabling a rapid and reliable recovery is the humble playbook.

What is an Incident Recovery Playbook?

An incident recovery playbook is a written document that provides a clear, step-by-step guide for responding to and recovering from a specific type of incident. It covers all the key information needed to reliably restore systems and services to normal operation, including:

• Scope and objectives of the recovery effort
• Technical steps and procedures to be followed
• Tools, data, and other resources required
• Roles and responsibilities of team members
• Communication protocols and stakeholder notifications
• Documentation and record-keeping requirements

The goal of a playbook is to provide a clear and comprehensive plan that enables the incident response team to take fast, decisive action with minimal confusion or wasted effort. By laying out proven procedures in advance, playbooks help eliminate guesswork and ad-hoc decision making in the heat of an incident. As the old military saying goes, "no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy" – but having a solid, well-rehearsed plan greatly improves your odds of success.

Despite the clear benefits, many organizations still lack formally documented recovery playbooks. A 2020 survey by DNS monitoring provider EfficientIP found that only 52% of organizations have playbooks in place to guide incident response[^2]. Lack of time and resources is often cited as the main blocker to playbook adoption.

Key Components of an Effective Playbook

So what goes into creating an effective incident recovery playbook? While the specific content will vary depending on the type of incident and the nature of your environment, there are some common elements every playbook should include:

Define Scope and Objectives

The first step is to clearly define the specific type of incident the playbook covers, and the high-level objectives of the recovery effort. Is it a ransomware attack? A power outage in a data center? An application outage due to a bad code push? Be as specific as possible in describing the scenario.

The objectives are typically things like:

• Restoring critical systems and data
• Preventing further damage
• Preserving evidence for later investigation
• Communicating status to stakeholders

Defining a clear scope keeps the playbook focused and avoids mission creep. Trying to cover too broad a range of scenarios in a single playbook makes it unwieldy and hard to follow.

Specify Tools, Processes and Procedures

The heart of the playbook is the specific technical steps and procedures that need to be executed to recover from the incident. This should be a detailed, sequential list of actions, along with the tools and resources needed to complete each one.

For example, a playbook for recovering from a failed deployment might include steps like:

1. Triage the failure and determine blast radius

   
   # Check app logs for errors 
   grep -i "error" /var/log/myapp.log

2. Identify the commit that introduced the bug 
```bash
# Inspect build/deploy pipeline logs
cat /var/log/gitlab-ci/pipeline.log | grep "Deploying application"

# Use git bisect if needed to locate bad commit
git bisect start
git bisect bad <broken_version>
git bisect good <last_known_good>

3. Decide on recovery approach (rollback vs roll-forward)
4. Execute recovery

   
   # Rollback to last-known good version
   git checkout <last_good_commit>
   make deploy

git revert
git push

5. Verify service health
```bash
# Check app and infra monitoring
curl -f http://myservice.com/healthcheck

6. Communicate resolution

The level of detail should be sufficient that someone with the requisite skills could execute the plan without needing additional information. Wheneven possible, include specific commands, code snippets, and links to external tools and resources. If feasible, automate as much as possible using configuration management or Infrastructure-as-Code tools to minimize manual effort and risk of errors.

Define Roles and Responsibilities

Clearly specify who is responsible for each task in the recovery process and what their role entails. This includes not only technical resources like sysadmins and developers, but also management roles involved in communication, legal issues, public relations, and customer support.

Include contact information for each team member, and specify backups in case the primary person is unavailable. Also define communication protocols and approval processes – who needs to sign off before systems can be brought back online?

Confusion over roles and responsibilities is one of the biggest obstacles to smooth incident response, so this section is critical. Conducting practice runs of the playbook is a great way to ensure everyone knows their role.

A clear roles and responsibilities matrix is helpful for delineating duties:

Role	Primary	Secondary	Responsibilities
Incident Commander	Jane S	John D	Coordinate response, comms
Technical Lead	Sasha P	Mark R	Troubleshoot, guide recovery
Comms Lead	Mo J	Sarah T	Internal/external status updates
…	…	…	…

Require Documentation and Record-Keeping

Thorough documentation is essential for later investigation and process improvement. The playbook should specify what records need to be kept, in what format, and who is responsible for maintaining them. This may include:

• Detailed timeline of events and actions taken
• System logs and audit trails
• Screenshots and other forensic evidence
• Lists of impacted systems and data
• Communication records (emails, chat transcripts, etc.)
• After-action review notes

Make sure there are clear processes in place for centralizing and securing this documentation.

Include Maintenance and Testing Requirements

An out-of-date playbook is almost worse than no playbook at all. The playbook should specify a regular schedule and process for reviewing and updating its contents to ensure it stays current. This should include version control and a way to notify team members of updates.

Even more importantly, schedule regular practice runs to ensure team members are familiar with their roles and responsibilities, and that the documented procedures actually work as intended. Ideally, a full-fledged simulation of a major incident is ideal. At minimum, a tabletop walkthrough of the playbook should be conducted periodically.

Automating Playbooks for Faster Recovery

While documenting manual procedures in a playbook is a big improvement over ad-hoc response, the holy grail is fully automated recovery that can be initiated with the push of a button (or an API call). Modern Infrastructure-as-Code and configuration management tools make it possible to express your entire environment as versioned, executable code and automate the vast majority of recovery tasks.

For example, with a tool like Terraform or AWS CloudFormation, you can define your entire cloud infrastructure – networks, servers, storage, etc. – as a set of declarative configuration files. When an outage occurs, you can automatically spin up a clean environment from known-good configs instead of manually rebuilding servers. Combine this with automated config deployment (Ansible, Puppet, etc.), data backup/restore, and pre-written diagnostics and remediation scripts, and you have the makings of a self-healing architecture that can detect and recover from many incidents without human intervention.

Here‘s a simple example of an Ansible playbook that could be used to automatically roll back a failed application release:

---
- hosts: webservers
  vars:
    app_version: 2.3.1
  tasks:
    - name: Remove failed version
      file:
        path: /opt/myapp/{{ app_version }}
        state: absent

    - name: Symlink to last-known good version  
      file:
        src: /opt/myapp/2.2.4
        dest: /opt/myapp/current
        state: link

    - name: Restart application
      systemd:
        name: myapp
        state: restarted

Of course, full automation isn‘t feasible for every type of incident – some situations will always require human judgment and manual action. But the more recovery tasks you can automate, the faster and more reliable your recovery will be. Well-designed playbooks provide a crucial bridge between manual and automated response.

Real-world data shows this automation is becoming increasingly central to incident response. The 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps report found that elite performers automate 59% of their incident response practices, compared to just 10% for low performers[^3]. And research from IDC shows that extensive use of automation improves recovery times by 74% on average[^4].

The Proof is in the Practice

Ultimately, the true test of an incident recovery playbook is how well it works in a real-world crisis. No matter how comprehensive and well-written your playbook is, its effectiveness depends on the team‘s ability to execute it quickly and reliably. Theoretical knowledge is no substitute for hands-on practice and muscle memory.

This is why regular practice drills and simulated incidents are so important. They provide a safe way to test your playbooks and procedures, identify gaps and points of confusion, and give team members valuable experience to draw on when a real incident occurs. Thorough post-mortems after both drills and real incidents allow you to continuously improve the playbooks and address issues.

The 2018 Chaos Community Report from the Gremlin team found a clear correlation between the frequency of failure testing and the speed of incident response. Teams that ran failure drills at least monthly had a 50% lower mean time to resolve (MTTR) compared to teams that tested annually or less[^5]. Regular practice matters.

Famous examples like the 2017 AWS S3 outage and 2019 Google Cloud outage illustrate the importance of practiced response. In the S3 incident, AWS engineers were able to restore services in about 4 hours, thanks in large part to their well-honed incident response playbooks and processes. The Google outage took significantly longer to resolve – post-mortem analysis revealed deficiencies in recovery documentation and lack of practice with large-scale failures as contributing factors.

Integrating with DevOps and SRE Practices

It‘s important to recognize that incident recovery playbooks don‘t exist in a vacuum. To be truly effective, they need to be integrated with broader DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices across the organization.

Some key points of integration include:

• Embedding playbook creation and maintenance into the development lifecycle, with playbooks treated as code artifacts
• Defining service level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets that trigger playbook usage
• Incorporating playbook procedures into blameless post-mortem reviews
• Using playbooks as a key mechanism for implementing progressive rollouts and canarying
• Automating incident response and playbook execution via ChatOps tools

Google‘s famous SRE book sums up the philosophy well: "Hope is not a strategy. Well-defined incident response processes and playbooks prevent responders from wasting time trying to figure out what to do when seconds count."[^6]

Getting Started with Playbooks

If you‘re new to incident response playbooks, the prospect of building them from scratch can seem daunting. The good news is you don‘t have to start from a blank page – there are many great templates and examples available to draw from.

Some useful resources include:

• The PagerDuty Incident Response Documentation Template[^7]
• Atlassian‘s Incident Handbook template[^8]
• Google‘s SRE guide, specifically Chapter 15 on Postmortem Culture[^9]
• The Incident Labs playbook template collection[^10]

When creating your first playbooks, start small and simple. Begin with a playbook for a relatively common, low-severity incident type to get a feel for the process. Solicit feedback from all stakeholders, and iterate based on what you learn from each usage. Remember, playbooks are living documents that should evolve over time as your systems and practices mature.

Conclusion

In a perfect world, we‘d never need to worry about IT outages or cybersecurity breaches. But in reality, incidents are a fact of life that every organization needs to be prepared for. Well-crafted incident recovery playbooks are one of the most powerful tools we have for minimizing downtime and disruption from inevitable failures. By specifying clear, comprehensive procedures and enabling teams to take fast, decisive action, playbooks provide a roadmap for navigating crisis situations.

But realizing the full value of playbooks requires a commitment to developing and maintaining them, automating recovery tasks wherever possible, and continuously practicing and refining incident response capabilities. Waiting until you‘re in the midst of an outage to crack open the playbook for the first time is a recipe for confusion and costly delays. Regularly exercising your playbooks and procedures ensures that when an incident does occur, your team can respond quickly and confidently to keep the business running.

Don‘t let your playbooks gather dust on a shelf – make them a living, integral part of your operations and culture of resilience. Your customers (and your engineers) will thank you.

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[^1]: "The Cost of Downtime". Gartner. July 2014.
[^2]: "DNS Threat Report 2020". EfficientIP. 2020.
[^3]: "2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report". Google Cloud. 2021.
[^4]: "The State of Automation in Incident Response". IDC. April 2019.
[^5]: "2018 Chaos Community Report". Gremlin Inc. January 2019.
[^6]: Beyer, Betsy, et al. "Site Reliability Engineering". O‘Reilly Media, Inc. 2016.
[^7]: "Incident Response Documentation Template". PagerDuty.
[^8]: "Incident Handbook Template". Atlassian.
[^9]: Beyer, Betsy, et al. "Site Reliability Engineering, Chapter 15 – Postmortem Culture". O‘Reilly Media, Inc. 2016.
[^10]: "The Incident Playbook Gallery". Incident Labs.