technical-runbook

A production operations guide, or runbook, with step-by-step instructions for responding to alerts, diagnosing failures, and recovering a service.

In plain words
What is it for?
Documenting system dependencies, monitoring locations, alert responses, failure diagnosis, recovery actions, escalation paths, and maintenance.
Why use it?
It gives on-call engineers a quick way to handle incidents even when they do not already know the service.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/fattain-naime/engineering-docs/technical-runbook
Any agent
npx skills add fattain-naime/engineering-docs --skill technical-runbook
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fattain-naime/engineering-docs

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 62 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,699 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00062 $0.03699
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.01850
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00740
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00370

Measured 2d ago against content hash 979cac7cefa4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

technical-runbook scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -vI https://[domain] 2>&1 | grep -i "expire\|issuer\|subject"
skills/technical-runbook/SKILL.md · 254 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 254 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Purpose

Produce a runbook that enables any trained engineer - with no prior knowledge of this specific service - to respond to an alert, diagnose a failure, and execute recovery procedures.

A runbook is not a tutorial or an architecture overview. It is a rapid-reference guide for someone who is paged at 3 AM and needs to resolve an incident in 15 minutes, not learn the system from scratch.

Input

Works best with: The name of the service being documented. Also valuable: The alert definitions, common failure modes, diagnostic commands, architecture overview, and escalation contacts.

Example invocation: Write a runbook for the PayFlow payment gateway. It's a PHP 8.3 app on Nginx/PHP-FPM, MySQL primary + replica, Redis for sessions/cache, and a queue worker process for async jobs. Alerts fire for: high 5xx rate, slow DB queries, queue depth > 1000, and PHP-FPM pool exhaustion.

Key Concepts

What a Good Runbook Contains (Google SRE Standard)

  1. Overview - What the service does, its SLA, and its dependencies (30 seconds to read)
  2. Monitoring and Dashboards - Where to look when something is wrong
  3. Alert Response Procedures - One procedure per alert: diagnosis, mitigation, escalation
  4. Common Failure Modes - The top 5-10 failures that happen repeatedly
  5. Diagnostic Commands - The exact commands to run for each symptom
  6. Escalation Path - Who to call when the runbook cannot resolve the issue
  7. Maintenance Procedures - Restart, scale, backup, restore

MTTR Reduction

The primary goal of a runbook is to reduce MTTR. Every section should ask: "Can an on-call engineer execute this step in < 5 minutes?" If not, simplify or add more specific commands.

Certificate Management and Rotation

TLS certificates are a common source of outages when they expire or are misconfigured. Document:

  • Certificate inventory: Every certificate in use, its issuer, expiry date, and the service(s) it protects.
  • Rotation procedure: Exact steps to renew and deploy a new certificate. Include both automated (Let's Encrypt / certbot) and manual (purchased certificate) paths.
  • Rotation schedule: How often certificates are rotated (e.g., 90 days for Let's Encrypt, annually for purchased certs). Document the reminder/automation mechanism.
  • Emergency rotation: What to do if a certificate is compromised or expires unexpectedly. Include the expedited path (e.g., bypassing normal change control).
  • Verification commands: How to verify a certificate is correctly deployed and valid after rotation:
    echo | openssl s_client -connect [domain]:443 -servername [domain] 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -dates
    curl -vI https://[domain] 2>&1 | grep -i "expire\|issuer\|subject"
    

Read the full file on GitHub · 254 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 254 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A 979cac7cefa4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

technical-runbook is a skill published in the GitHub repository fattain-naime/engineering-docs (4 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 62 tokens to every session and 3,699 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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