Playbook Definition

A Playbook is a set of instructions that Doctor Droid bot or On-call Engineer is expected to follow during a production incident.

A playbook comprises of 4 core components:

Tasks

An instruction that you are looking to automate is a task in a PlayBook. Here are a couple of examples:

  • "Fetch database metric from my cloud provider"
  • "Run kubectl commands on a remote sever"

There's a long list of different types of tasks that can be configured within a Playbook. Scroll below to read more about them.


Conditions

A condition is a rule that helps define if a certain action should be taken or not. Here are a couple of examples:

  • Check if log output has a certain error string
  • Check if a metric's threshold is above a certain limit

Variables

A variable is a value that can be re-used within different tasks. For example, you can set the pod-name as a variable and change it -- making the playbook re-useable for different teams.


Notes

If you have any custom guideline that you want to give to the user related to the playbook or a specific task within playbook, you can leverage the notes section. It supports addition of markdown text and links.