incident-response

Overview

Based on the Google SRE Book by Beyer, Jones, Petoff & Murphy. Google's incident management framework establishes clear roles, communication protocols, and decision hierarchies that let teams respond to complex outages without chaos. The core principle: when systems fail, the response should be calmer and more structured than the incident itself.

Three SRE roles during an incident:

• Incident Commander (IC) - owns the response, makes decisions, delegates
• Operations Lead - makes changes to the system (the IC does not touch production)
• Communications Lead - handles stakeholder updates, keeps IC focused on the incident

Workflow

Step 1: Declare the incident

If in doubt, declare. It's always easier to stand down an incident than to escalate a non-incident that becomes one.

Set severity: