Sentry Incident Runbook

Overview

Structured incident response framework built on Sentry's error monitoring platform. Covers the full lifecycle from alert detection through severity classification, root cause investigation using Sentry's breadcrumbs and stack traces, Discover queries for impact analysis, stakeholder communication, resolution via the Sentry API, and postmortem documentation with Sentry data exports.

Prerequisites

• Sentry account with project-level access and auth token (SENTRY_AUTH_TOKEN)
• Organization slug (SENTRY_ORG) and project slug (SENTRY_PROJECT) configured
• @sentry/node (v8+) or equivalent SDK installed in the application
• Alert rules configured for critical error thresholds
• Notification channels connected (Slack integration or PagerDuty)

Instructions

Step 1 — Classify Severity

Assign a severity level based on error frequency and user impact. This determines response time and escalation path.