runbook
termops culturenetworking
A documented procedure for carrying out a specific operational task or handling a known situation.
A good runbook turns tribal knowledge into steps anyone on call can follow at 3am: preconditions, exact commands, checks, and rollback. It is the difference between a calm, repeatable change and improvisation under pressure.
A runbook is the written procedure for a recurring operational task, and its value is in being followable by someone who was not there when it was written. That is a higher bar than it sounds: a runbook written by the expert usually omits exactly the steps they no longer notice performing.
The test is whether it has been executed by someone else, ideally during a drill rather than an incident. An unexecuted runbook is a documented intention, and the failure mode is discovering mid-outage that it references a hostname that changed, a credential nobody has, or a step whose output no longer looks like the example. Runbooks that are rehearsed stay correct; runbooks that are written and filed decay silently alongside the systems they describe.
Also known as: run book, playbook