Incident Response Playbook

Structured incident response for business and IT teams. Guides you through detection, triage, containment, resolution, and post-mortem — with auto-generated timelines and action items.

What It Does

When triggered with an incident description, this skill:

1. Classifies severity (P1-P4) based on impact and urgency
2. Generates a response checklist tailored to incident type (outage, data breach, security event, service degradation, vendor failure)
3. Builds a communication plan — who to notify, when, what channels
4. Creates a real-time timeline as you log updates
5. Produces a post-mortem template with root cause analysis and prevention steps

Usage

Tell your agent about an incident:

> "Production API is returning 500 errors for 20% of requests. Started 10 minutes ago."

Or trigger proactively:

> "Create an incident response plan for a potential data breach scenario"

Incident Types Covered

• Service outages — full or partial downtime
• Security incidents — breaches, unauthorized access, phishing
• Data incidents — corruption, loss, privacy violations
• Vendor failures — third-party SLA breaches
• Performance degradation — latency spikes, capacity issues

Severity Matrix

| Level | Impact | Response Time | Escalation | |-------|--------|---------------|------------| | P1 - Critical | Business stopped | Immediate | Executive + all hands | | P2 - High | Major feature down | < 30 min | Engineering lead + PM | | P3 - Medium | Degraded experience | < 2 hours | On-call team | | P4 - Low | Minor issue | Next business day | Ticket queue |

Response Framework

1. Detection & Triage (First 5 minutes)

• Confirm the incident is real (not a false alarm)
• Classify severity using the matrix above
• Assign incident commander
• Open a dedicated communication channel

2. Containment (First 30 minutes)

• Identify blast radius — what's affected?
• Apply immediate mitigation (rollback, feature flag, scaling)
• Communicate status to stakeholders

3. Resolution

• Root cause investigation
• Implement fix with verification
• Monitor for recurrence
• Update all stakeholders

4. Post-Mortem (Within 48 hours)

• Timeline of events
• Root cause analysis (5 Whys)
• What went well / what didn't
• Action items with owners and deadlines
• Process improvements

Integration

Works with any monitoring stack. Feed alerts from PagerDuty, Datadog, Grafana, or manual reports.

Pro Tip

Pair this with a full AI Operations Context Pack for your industry. Pre-built incident taxonomies, compliance-aware escalation paths, and automated stakeholder templates.

Browse packs: https://afrexai-cto.github.io/context-packs/

Free tools:

• AI Revenue Calculator: https://afrexai-cto.github.io/ai-revenue-calculator/
• Agent Setup Wizard: https://afrexai-cto.github.io/agent-setup/