Why You Need an Incident Response Plan

When AWS, GitHub, Slack, or any critical third-party service goes down, your team needs to act fast. Without a plan, valuable time is wasted figuring out what's happening and what to do. A well-crafted incident response plan turns chaos into coordinated action.

Step 1: Identify Your Critical Dependencies

Start by mapping all third-party services your application depends on:

  • Infrastructure: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Cloudflare
  • Code & CI/CD: GitHub, GitLab, Docker, CircleCI
  • Communication: Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams
  • Payments: Stripe, PayPal
  • Auth: Okta, Auth0, Clerk

For each service, document: what breaks if it goes down, who is affected, and what the workaround is.

Step 2: Set Up Monitoring

You can't respond to what you don't know about. Set up real-time monitoring for all critical dependencies:

  • Use ServiceAlert.ai to monitor status pages of your vendors
  • Configure alerts to go to your on-call channel (Slack, Teams, PagerDuty)
  • Set up health checks for your own services that depend on third parties

    • Step 3: Define Severity Levels

    Not all outages are equal. Define severity levels that trigger different responses:

    • SEV-1 (Critical): Complete service outage affecting all users
    • SEV-2 (Major): Partial outage or degraded performance for many users
    • SEV-3 (Minor): Degraded performance for a subset of users
    • SEV-4 (Low): Minor issue with workaround available

    Step 4: Create Response Playbooks

    For each critical dependency, create a playbook:

    Example: Payment Provider Outage

  • Detect: ServiceAlert.ai sends Slack alert about Stripe degradation
  • Assess: Check if payment processing is affected in your app
  • Communicate: Update your status page, notify customer support
  • Mitigate: Enable backup payment processor if available
  • Monitor: Watch for resolution via ServiceAlert.ai
  • Recover: Retry failed payments, verify data consistency
  • Review: Post-incident review within 48 hours

    • Step 5: Practice and Iterate

    A plan that's never tested is just a document. Run tabletop exercises quarterly:

  • Simulate an outage scenario
  • Walk through the response playbook
  • Identify gaps and update the plan
  • Document lessons learned

    • Key Takeaways

    • Map your dependencies before an outage happens
    • Set up automated monitoring so you know before your users do
    • Define clear severity levels and response procedures
    • Practice your response plan regularly

    Monitor your dependencies with ServiceAlert.ai | View incident history