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Ask HN: What software exists for playbooks/runbooks?

6 points by jotto ↗ HN
A playbook/runbook meaning an editable guide or set of strategies to solving problems a company/individual encounters throughout their existence.

Are people just using wikis or google docs?

6 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 22.4 ms ] thread
arthurcolle
Run-books are an anti-pattern designed to resolve issues that shouldn't be present in well written software.
tnolet
Similar to how emergency procedures on boats and airplanes are an anti pattern designed to resolve sinking or crashing?

I admire your positive outlook, but the world is messy and things fail all the time. Even well written software can go poof when us-east-1 goes down or your fileserver goes poof.

finnthehuman
So throw away the disaster recover plan and blame the vendors if anything goes wrong? Got it.
Spooky23
In case of fire, blame vendor.
verdverm
We just use markdown on github
sethammons
We just use the company wiki. We are thinking of moving that data to the service GitHub repo instead to keep the data more local. It is easy to forget to update documentation all ready, might as well reduce the places you have to update.

Ideally all alerts are either self-evident or link to proper remediation steps to attempt when auto-remediation is not available. The new person on the team should have enough info to do basic triage at 3am at the very least given a decent runbook/alert documentation.