Start with the big picture and provide your operations team an overview of your system architecture. This helps your team understand how your hosts and services work together so they can respond to outages most effectively. Create a diagram that outlines your system architecture and add it to the template. Then share the template with your operations team.

Now that you’ve explained your system architecture to your operations team, make sure they have everything they need before an outage occurs. Use our template to assign support leads and add their contact information. Then use the template to list and organize the operations tasks your runbook is automating.

It’s time to get detailed. When a system outage or alert pops up, your team will need to know how to start, stop, and monitor the system. They’ll also need to know how to respond to any potential scenario you can anticipate. Use our template to explain each step your operations team needs to follow to debug the system. Make sure to update the template as you enhance your system architecture and identify new outage scenarios.