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.
82
77%
Does it follow best practices?
Impact
Pending
No eval scenarios have been run
Advisory
Suggest reviewing before use
Optimize this skill with Tessl
npx tessl skill review --optimize ./plugins/incident-response/skills/incident-runbook-templates/SKILL.mdQuality
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 defines what the skill does (creates incident response runbooks) and provides rich, specific trigger scenarios for when to use it. The description uses third person voice correctly, includes natural keywords that on-call engineers would use, and carves out a distinct niche that wouldn't overlap with general documentation skills. The only minor note is that it's somewhat verbose, but the detail serves the purpose of disambiguation well.
| 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, and recovery actions) and 'when' with explicit trigger scenarios (service outage runbook, database incident procedures, onboarding on-call engineers, standardizing escalation matrices). | 3 / 3 |
Trigger Term Quality | Excellent coverage of natural terms users would say: 'incident response', 'runbook', 'service outage', 'payment processing', 'database incident', 'on-call engineers', 'recovery guides', 'escalation matrices', 'disk space alerts', 'replication lag'. These are terms engineers would naturally use when requesting this kind of content. | 3 / 3 |
Distinctiveness Conflict Risk | Highly distinctive niche focused specifically on incident response runbooks and on-call procedures. The detailed trigger scenarios (payment processing outages, database incidents, on-call onboarding) make it very unlikely to conflict with general documentation or coding 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 bloated — inlining two complete runbook templates, communication templates, best practices lists, and extensive troubleshooting scenarios into a single file. This content would be far more effective as a concise overview with references to separate template files.
Suggestions
Extract the Service Outage Runbook template and Database Incident Runbook template into separate referenced files (e.g., SERVICE_OUTAGE_TEMPLATE.md, DATABASE_INCIDENT_TEMPLATE.md) and keep SKILL.md as a concise overview with links.
Remove the 'Best Practices' do's/don'ts section — advice like 'don't work alone' and 'keep stakeholders informed' is generic knowledge Claude already has.
Move communication templates to a separate COMMS_TEMPLATES.md file referenced from the main skill.
Cut the 'When to Use This Skill' and 'Core Concepts' sections which largely duplicate the frontmatter description and explain obvious incident management concepts.
| Dimension | Reasoning | Score |
|---|---|---|
Conciseness | This skill is extremely verbose at ~350+ lines. It includes extensive template content that could be referenced as separate files, explains obvious concepts (severity levels, do's/don'ts lists with basic advice like 'don't work alone'), and includes full communication templates that pad the token budget significantly. Much of this is boilerplate that Claude could generate on demand. | 1 / 3 |
Actionability | The skill provides fully executable bash commands, SQL queries, kubectl commands, and curl requests that are copy-paste ready. Each mitigation scenario includes specific, numbered steps with real commands targeting concrete infrastructure components. | 3 / 3 |
Workflow Clarity | Multi-step procedures are clearly sequenced with numbered steps, verification checkpoints (dedicated '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 | This is a monolithic wall of text with everything inlined. The full service outage runbook template, database runbook template, communication templates, best practices, and troubleshooting are all in a single file. The templates should be separate referenced files, with SKILL.md serving as a concise overview pointing to them. | 1 / 3 |
Total | 8 / 12 Passed |
Validation
100%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
91fe43e
- Reviewed
Table of Contents
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