Practice : Automated Incident Response

Purpose and Strategic Importance

Automated Incident Response reduces time-to-recovery and human error by executing predefined actions in response to known failure modes. It improves system resilience and on-call experience by handling predictable issues without requiring manual intervention.

This practice enables engineering teams to scale operations, reduce fatigue, and focus human effort on diagnosis and innovation - not routine firefighting.

Description of the Practice

  • Automated responses are triggered by alerts, metric anomalies, or health check failures.
  • Common examples include restarting services, clearing queues, scaling infrastructure, toggling traffic, or rolling back changes.
  • Responses are built on top of monitoring systems, runbooks, orchestration tools, and platform APIs.
  • Includes pre-incident automation (to prevent) and post-incident automation (to mitigate).

How to Practise It (Playbook)

1. Getting Started

  • Identify high-frequency, low-complexity incidents that follow a known recovery pattern.
  • Capture current manual response steps in existing runbooks.
  • Use scripting tools, platform APIs, or infrastructure-as-code to codify those actions.
  • Add safeguards and observability around automated steps (e.g. confirmation logs, state validation).

2. Scaling and Maturing

  • Integrate automation into alerting platforms (e.g. PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Prometheus).
  • Expand automation to incident triage: log gathering, service status updates, stakeholder comms.
  • Version control automation logic to track changes and support audits.
  • Test automation regularly in staging or via chaos engineering.
  • Pair automation with post-incident analysis to identify more candidate scenarios.

3. Team Behaviours to Encourage

  • Prioritise toil reduction and operational excellence alongside feature delivery.
  • Treat automation as a reliability investment - not just a convenience.
  • Practice graceful degradation: automate rollback or fallback paths.
  • Share success stories to build trust in automation.

4. Watch Out For…

  • Automations that trigger prematurely or without sufficient context.
  • Scripts that are fragile, undocumented, or lack observability.
  • Team fear or distrust of automation due to lack of transparency.
  • Failure to keep automated responses updated with system changes.

5. Signals of Success

  • Common incidents are mitigated or resolved without human intervention.
  • On-call responders are paged less often for known, automatable issues.
  • Mean time to recover (MTTR) decreases for automated scenarios.
  • Automation is trusted, maintained, and owned by the teams it serves.
  • Incident response feels calm, efficient, and sustainable.