Meaning
A compilation of routine procedures, operations, and troubleshooting steps for maintaining a system or responding to incidents.
Three examples from work
Incident response
On-call DevThe Redis cluster is out of memory. Is there a documented runbook?
DevOpsYes, check the emergency runbook for the cache eviction and flush procedure.
Onboarding
LeadBefore taking your first on-call shift, please read through the database outage runbooks.
Junior DevI'll review them and run a drill in the staging environment.
Audit
SREOur disaster recovery runbook hasn't been updated since the cloud migration.
LeadLet's test every command step-by-step during our next maintenance window.
A good runbook gives clear, copy-pasteable commands and expected outputs so engineers can act calmly during high-stress production outages.