incident-runbook-templates

Create structured incident response runbooks with step-by-step procedures, escalation paths, and recovery actions. Use this skill when building a service outage runbook for a payment processing system; creating database incident procedures covering connection pool exhaustion, replication lag, and disk space alerts; onboarding new on-call engineers who need step-by-step recovery guides written for a 3 AM brain; or standardizing escalation matrices across multiple engineering teams.

Quality

77%

Does it follow best practices?

Impact

Pending

No eval scenarios have been run

Securityby

Advisory

Suggest reviewing before use

Optimize this skill with Tessl

npx tessl skill review --optimize ./plugins/incident-response/skills/incident-runbook-templates/SKILL.md

Quality

Discovery

100%

Based on the skill's description, can an agent find and select it at the right time? Clear, specific descriptions lead to better discovery.

This is an excellent skill description that clearly articulates what the skill does and provides rich, specific trigger scenarios for when to use it. The description uses third person voice correctly, includes highly relevant domain-specific keywords that engineers would naturally use, and carves out a distinct niche that minimizes conflict risk with other skills. The detailed examples in the 'Use when' clause are particularly strong, covering multiple realistic scenarios.

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Specificity	Lists multiple specific concrete actions: 'step-by-step procedures, escalation paths, and recovery actions' plus detailed examples like 'connection pool exhaustion, replication lag, and disk space alerts' and 'escalation matrices'.	3 / 3
Completeness	Clearly answers both 'what' (create structured incident response runbooks with step-by-step procedures, escalation paths, recovery actions) and 'when' (explicit 'Use this skill when...' clause with four detailed trigger scenarios).	3 / 3
Trigger Term Quality	Excellent coverage of natural terms users would say: 'incident response', 'runbook', 'service outage', 'on-call', 'escalation', 'recovery guides', 'database incident procedures', 'disk space alerts', 'replication lag'. These are terms engineers naturally use when seeking this kind of help.	3 / 3
Distinctiveness Conflict Risk	Highly distinctive niche focused specifically on incident response runbooks for engineering/operations contexts. The specific domain terms like 'runbook', 'on-call', 'escalation matrices', and 'payment processing system' make it very unlikely to conflict with other skills.	3 / 3
	Total	12 / 12 Passed

Implementation

55%

Reviews the quality of instructions and guidance provided to agents. Good implementation is clear, handles edge cases, and produces reliable results.

The skill excels at actionability with concrete, executable commands and clear workflow sequencing with validation checkpoints. However, it is severely undermined by its monolithic structure — cramming two complete runbook templates, communication templates, best practices, and extensive troubleshooting into a single file that would consume significant context window. The content would benefit enormously from splitting templates into separate files and trimming explanatory prose that Claude doesn't need.

Suggestions

Split the two runbook templates (Service Outage, Database) into separate referenced files (e.g., SERVICE_OUTAGE_TEMPLATE.md, DATABASE_RUNBOOK_TEMPLATE.md) and keep SKILL.md as a concise overview with links.

Remove the Do's/Don'ts best practices section — Claude already knows these principles and they add ~20 lines of no actionable value.

Condense the troubleshooting section significantly — the explanatory paragraphs (e.g., 'Runbooks rot because they're updated manually') are unnecessary; just provide the solution patterns.

Move communication templates to a separate COMMS_TEMPLATES.md file referenced from the main skill.

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Conciseness	The skill is extremely verbose at ~350+ lines. It includes extensive best practices lists (Do's/Don'ts), troubleshooting scenarios with explanations Claude already knows (e.g., explaining why runbooks rot, why engineers panic), and communication templates that are largely boilerplate. Much of this could be condensed significantly or split into referenced files.	1 / 3
Actionability	The skill provides fully executable bash commands, SQL queries, kubectl commands, and curl requests that are copy-paste ready. Each mitigation procedure has numbered, concrete steps with real commands and expected contexts.	3 / 3
Workflow Clarity	Multi-step procedures are clearly sequenced with numbered steps, verification checkpoints (the 'Verification Steps' section), rollback procedures, and explicit escalation conditions. The troubleshooting section adds dry-run checks before destructive operations and prerequisite validation, creating proper feedback loops.	3 / 3
Progressive Disclosure	The entire skill is a monolithic wall of text with everything inline — two full runbook templates, communication templates, best practices, troubleshooting scenarios, and database procedures all in one file. The templates should be in separate referenced files, with SKILL.md serving as an overview with navigation links.	1 / 3
	Total	8 / 12 Passed

Validation

100%

Warnings & errors only

Checks the skill against the spec for correct structure and formatting. All validation checks must pass before discovery and implementation can be scored.

Validation — 11 / 11 Passed

Validation for skill structure

No warnings or errors.

Repository: wshobson/agents
Commit: 27a7ed9

Reviewed: 8 days ago

Table of Contents

Discovery Implementation Validation

Is this your skill?

If you maintain this skill, you can claim it as your own. Once claimed, you can manage eval scenarios, bundle related skills, attach documentation or rules, and ensure cross-agent compatibility.