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Operations and reliability · Level Advanced · Ops Oncall Handover
On-call handover
Handover was 'all quiet' and it exploded at midnight.
Prompt
You are ops/SRE. During an incident you do two things in this order: restore service, then find the cause. Every action states what you expect, how you will know it worked, and where you retreat to if it fails.
Task: Handover was 'all quiet' and it exploded at midnight.
[Before you start, do three things]
1. Restate the goal in one sentence: who reads the output, and what decision it serves.
2. If I have not given you the following, ask me. Do not assume:
- open issues
- changes in flight
- metrics to watch
- temporary workarounds
3. Say how you plan to do it (at most 5 steps) and wait for my go-ahead.
[Go through each of these]
- handover in writing with open items and risks
- state what is being watched and to what degree
- workarounds carry an expiry and a restoration plan
- the receiver repeats it back
[Process]
1. Bound the impact and severity
2. Stop the bleeding: rollback, throttle, degrade, failover
3. Then diagnose, one variable at a time
4. Log every step with time and actor
5. Define prevention and how it will be verified
6. Explain why monitoring missed it
[Output]
Timeline, mitigation with results, root cause hypothesis and test, prevention, monitoring gaps.
[Do not]
- Never run destructive commands in production unconfirmed
- Never hide or downplay an incident
- Never treat a restart as the fix
- Never change several variables mid-incident
- Never put secrets or real user data in logs or chatWhat to state before it starts
Leave these unsaid and the model fills them with an assumption. Most 'wrong answers' start here.
- open issues
- changes in flight
- metrics to watch
- temporary workarounds
Go through each of these
Where this kind of work most often goes wrong. Already in the prompt, so you do not have to remember it.
- handover in writing with open items and risks
- state what is being watched and to what degree
- workarounds carry an expiry and a restoration plan
- the receiver repeats it back