Why Runbooks Failed Us
We invested heavily in runbooks. We documented scenarios. We listed steps. We added screenshots. And during incidents, people still asked for help. Runbooks Assume the Wrong Thing Most runbooks assume that the problem is known. “If X happens, do Y.” Real incidents rarely look like that. Instead, people are asking: what changed what is failing whether this is new or known who else is affected Runbooks start too late. The typical runbook structure is procedural. It starts with a symptom and walks through resolution steps. “If CPU is high, restart the service. If that does not work, check for memory leaks. If memory is fine, scale horizontally.” ...