Mastering Incident Response: Essential SRE Best Practices
Incident response planning is one of the key things that we should know how to do and prepare for as an SRE. The ability to handle incidents effectively is crucial for maintaining system reliability and ensuring user satisfaction. Here are some best practices to guide your incident response efforts, derived from real-world case studies and industry experience.
Best Practices
1. Early Declaration of Incidents
One of the most important aspects of incident response is recognizing and declaring an incident as early as possible. Waiting for a major problem to escalate before taking action can lead to significant delays in resolution and increased miscommunication between teams.
2. Maintain a Clear Line of Command
Having designated roles such as an Incident Commander (IC), Communications Lead (CL), and Operations Lead (OL) helps facilitate clear decision-making and avoids confusion. These roles ensure that everyone knows their responsibilities and can act accordingly.
3. Centralized Communication
During an incident, centralized communication is essential. Whether it’s a physical war room or a dedicated communication channel like IRC, Slack, Discord, Teams, having all responders in one place ensures everyone is on the same page.
4. Avoid Reliance on Heroics
While occasional weekend work might be necessary, it's important to have on-call schedules and conduct rollouts during business hours whenever possible. Relying on heroics can lead to burnout and inconsistent incident handling.
5. Prioritize Mitigation
The primary goal during an incident is to stop the bleeding and minimize user impact as quickly as possible. Focus on finding a solution to mitigate the problem, even if the root cause is not yet fully understood.
6. Develop Generic Mitigations
Having pre-defined actions that can be taken to alleviate problems quickly is crucial. These actions, such as rollbacks or reconfigurations, should be prepared in advance to handle common issues.
7. Learn from Postmortems
After resolving an incident, conducting a thorough postmortem is essential to understand what went wrong and how to improve. Use these insights to develop tools and techniques for better managing future incidents.
8. Conduct Incident Response Drills
Practicing your incident response procedures through drills helps identify vulnerabilities and ensures readiness for real-world scenarios.
9. Document Incident Response Procedures
Well-documented procedures and clear escalation paths are vital for a smooth and coordinated response. Ensure all team members are familiar with these procedures.
10. Invest in Sufficient Logging
Logs provide valuable information for diagnosing problems and identifying root causes. Ensure your logging infrastructure is robust and comprehensive.
11. Mitigate Complexity
Services with complex dependencies can be challenging to troubleshoot. Where feasible, simplify your architecture to reduce potential points of failure.
Things You Should Do While Handling Incidents
Do not go for “All hands on deck” approach. It never yields good result. Page only on-call engineers for the specific service, mobilize additional responders if needed.
Allow responders to leave once their tasks are completed, optimizing for the majority of cases.
Provide status updates every 20-30 minutes, focusing on resolving the incident and sharing meaningful information.
Educate staff that silence is acceptable and doesn’t mean progress has stalled.
Debating incident severity during calls wasted valuable time. Always assume higher severity and proceed, using the response as practice if needed.
Encourage escalation when needed, following "never hesitate to escalate" mantra.
Disagreements on policies and processes during calls can derail response efforts. Follow existing processes during incidents, raise concerns post-incident or during post-mortems.
Always conduct postmortems to understand incidents, improve processes, and avoid future mistakes.
Follow Incident Commander’s instructions, maintain broader context.
Introduce sensible changes to processes for long-term improvement
Incident Commanders should not act as Subject Matter Experts simultaneously. ICs should focus on their role; if necessary, handover to another IC before assuming SME responsibilities.
Avoid multitasking and trying to solve all issues single-handedly. Delegate tasks, collaborate with other experts, avoid overlapping efforts.
Policy changes should be communicated clearly and ahead of time. Disseminate changes through emails or chat updates to ensure responders are informed.
These key lessons highlight the importance of a structured and proactive approach to incident response. By implementing these best practices, organizations can significantly improve their ability to handle outages and disruptions, ensuring better reliability and user satisfaction.
References
https://www.atlassian.com/incident-management/devops
https://www.splunk.com/en_us/about-splunk/acquisitions/splunk-on-call.html?301=/en_us/investor-relations/acquisitions/splunk-on-call.html
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/incident-management-devops-sre/
https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/applying-devops-principles-in-incident-response/