Major Incident Response Plan Template

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE: MAJOR INCIDENT RESPONSE PLAN (MIRP)

Template Registry Engineering & Operations

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1. Document Control Block

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2. Executive Summary & Purpose

This Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) defines the institutional-grade framework for identifying, containing, mitigating, and reviewing major infrastructure and application incidents across Template Registry production environments.

The purpose of this document is to eliminate ambiguity during high-stress operational failures, minimize Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), enforce strict accountability, and preserve cryptographic and forensic data integrity for post-incident root cause analysis (RCA). Compliance with this SOP is mandatory for all on-call engineers, system administrators, and engineering leadership.

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3. Scope & Prerequisites

3.1 Scope

• Applies to all production environments, container orchestration layers (Kubernetes), persistent storage clusters, CI/CD deployment pipelines, and identity/access management systems managed by Template Registry.

3.2 Prerequisites & Required Tooling

Personnel executing this SOP must maintain pre-configured access to the following systems:

• PagerDuty: Enterprise incident management and escalation interface.
• Slack: Dedicated war-room channels (#inc-YYYYMMDD-[identifier]).
• Datadog / Prometheus / Grafana: Telemetry, metrics aggregation, and APM tracing dashboards.
• Kubernetes CLI (kubectl): Authenticated access with cluster-admin privileges to all target production clusters.
• Terraform Cloud: Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) state inspection and execution rights.
• AWS / Cloud Provider Console: Multi-region administrative read/write access.

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4. Roles & Responsibilities (RACI Matrix)

(Legend: Responsible – The doer; Accountable – The owner; Consulted – The advisor; Informed – Kept updated)

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5. Step-by-Step Procedure

Phase 1: Detection, Triage, and Declaration

• 1.1 Acknowledge incoming high-severity alerts via PagerDuty within 3 minutes of emission.
• 1.2 Assess impact against the Major Incident Matrix:
  • Severity 1 (Sev-1): Complete systemic outage, data corruption, or verified security breach affecting >25% of active users.
  • Severity 2 (Sev-2): Significant degradation of core services, non-fatal database replication lag, or failure of secondary disaster recovery systems.
• 1.3 Declare a Major Incident by invoking the /incident declare Slack command or manually triggering the PagerDuty Sev-1 bridge.
• 1.4 Assign the Incident Commander (IC) role. The IC steps off the technical tools to focus entirely on coordination, delegation, and communication.
• 1.5 Spin up the dedicated bridge: join the auto-generated PagerDuty conference bridge and the Slack war-room channel (#inc-[date]-[slug]).

Phase 2: Containment & Operational Mitigation

• 2.1 Technical Lead (TL) directs diagnostic sweeps using Grafana dashboards and Datadog APM traces to locate the blast radius.
• 2.2 Execute immediate containment protocols if a runaway process, DDoS, or malicious ingress is identified:

  # Example: Isolate compromised Kubernetes deployment via network policy update
  kubectl apply -f /infrastructure/security/emergency-isolation-policy.yaml -n production
  

• 2.3 If mitigation requires rolling back a recent release, invoke the ArgoCD/GitLab CI emergency pipeline bypass to revert to the last known stable SHA:

  argocd app rollback template-registry-prod [REVISION_NUMBER]
  

• 2.4 Verify system telemetry stabilization for a minimum of 10 consecutive minutes following mitigation execution.

Phase 3: Resolution & Verification

• 3.1 Confirm full restoration of data integrity, API latency percentiles ($\text{p99} < 250\text{ms}$), and synthetic transaction monitors.
• 3.2 Formally declare the incident "Resolved" via the IC in the war-room channel and PagerDuty.
• 3.3 Transition all production clusters from "Active Mitigation" to "Enhanced Monitoring" status for the next 4 hours.
• 3.4 Archive all chat logs, terminal outputs, APM snapshots, and automated forensic dumps to the secure S3 compliance bucket (s3://tr-incident-forensics-vault/[incident-id]/).

Phase 4: Post-Incident Review & Remediation

• 4.1 Schedule the Blameless Post-Mortem meeting within 48 business hours of incident resolution.
• 4.2 Draft the Post-Mortem document utilizing the template at docs.templateregistry.internal/templates/post-mortem.
• 4.3 Assign Jira engineering tickets for all identified preventive action items (PIRs). Requirement: PIR tickets must be tagged with incident-remediation and assigned a resolution SLA of $\le 14$ calendar days.

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6. Quality Assurance & Pro-Tips

6.1 Best Practices

• Single-Threaded Communication: The Incident Commander is the sole authority authorized to provide updates to executive leadership and external stakeholders. Do not fragment communication channels.
• Log Preservation First: Never restart a crashing container or daemon without first capturing its crash logs or dumping core memory if forensic analysis is required.

6.2 Common Pitfalls to Avoid

• The "Hero" Anti-Pattern: Do not allow engineers to make undocumented, manual changes directly to production infrastructure. All interventions must be logged in the war-room channel.
• Premature Declaration of Resolution: Do not resolve an incident based on a single metric spike flattening; verify end-to-end user workflows.

6.3 Metric Thresholds & SLAs

• MTTA (Mean Time to Acknowledge): $\le 3\text{ minutes}$ (Sev-1).
• MTTD (Mean Time to Detect): $\le 5\text{ minutes}$ via automated anomaly detection.
• MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution): $\le 45\text{ minutes}$ for core template rendering pipelines.

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7. Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: What happens if the designated Incident Commander becomes unresponsive during a Sev-1 incident?

A: The Incident Commander role automatically transfers to the most senior available On-Call Systems Engineer present on the bridge after a 5-minute timeout. The newly assigned IC must announce the transition explicitly in the war-room channel.

Q2: Are we permitted to bypass standard change management controls (PR reviews, staging tests) during an active incident?

A: Yes. Under Sev-1 conditions, the Technical Lead and Incident Commander can jointly authorize an emergency hotfix bypass. However, an emergency change ticket and retrospective PR must be retroactively filed within 24 hours of incident closure for audit compliance.

Q3: Who manages external communications if enterprise customers are impacted by a registry outage?

A: The Communications Lead (CL) collaborates with Customer Success and Product Management to push updates to the public Status Page (status.templateregistry.com). Engineering must not communicate directly with external clients regarding technical specifics without CL approval.