Reduce MTTR with Runbooks
May 16, 2025
Tags:
Observability
Incident Response
Troubleshooting in modern Kubernetes environments is rarely straightforward.
When a service goes down or latency suddenly spikes, the pressure to resolve the issue quickly is high. But in many teams, the steps needed to troubleshoot are not always clear or easily accessible. As an engineer, you may often end up relying on past experience, scattered documentation, or ad-hoc Slack messages to figure out what to do next. This slows down the response time and increases Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR).
In fast-paced production environments, especially those running on Kubernetes, this gap can lead to prolonged outages or repeated mistakes. Runbooks are meant to bridge this gap by offering a structured, repeatable way to respond to known issues.
At Randoli, we’ve built a smarter, more contextual way to bring runbooks directly into your incident response workflow, so your team can resolve production issues faster, with less friction.
Reducing MTTR isn’t just about having better dashboards or more alerts. It’s about enabling the right action, at the right time. When an incident occurs, the pressure to respond quickly can lead to guesswork or reactive decision-making. Even with modern observability tools, engineers often need to switch between logs, metrics, and internal documentation to understand what went wrong and how to resolve it. But without structured guidance, this process can still be slow and error-prone, especially under pressure.
One of the biggest challenges is that remediation steps are rarely documented in a structured or consistent way. What worked last time might be buried in a teammate’s memory, an old incident ticket, or a Slack thread that no one bookmarked.
As teams grow and rotate responsibilities, this lack of shared operational knowledge becomes a serious blocker. It not only slows down incident response, but also increases the risk of repeated mistakes, escalations, and on-call burnout.
It can also make it more challenging for newer team members to ramp up effectively or contribute confidently during active incidents.
So, what are Runbooks? They are structured, step-by-step guides that help engineers respond to known issues in a consistent and reliable way. Instead of relying on memory or searching through old chats, teams can use a runbook to follow a predefined set of actions, whether it’s restarting a failed pod, investigating a memory leak, or checking for configuration drift in a misbehaving workload.
While the concept isn’t new and you may already be using them in some form, runbooks are becoming increasingly important in today’s Kubernetes environments. As systems grow more distributed, the complexity of diagnosing and resolving incidents has also increased. A single failure might involve multiple microservices, nodes, or infrastructure layers. In this context, having a clear and reusable path to resolution can make a meaningful difference, not just in how quickly an issue is fixed, but in how confidently teams respond under pressure.
For platform and DevOps teams, runbooks help reduce on-call fatigue, minimize escalations, and lower the time spent responding and resolving recurring issues. For organizations, they offer a way to preserve institutional knowledge, enforce operational standards, and make incident response more predictable across teams and environments.
But for runbooks to truly be useful, they need to be accessible, actionable, and tightly integrated into the incident response workflow, not buried in internal wikis or disconnected from real-time observability data.
As mentioned, while the concept of runbooks isn’t new, the way they’re typically implemented often falls short i.e. disconnected from real-time context, hard to access, and rarely updated.
At Randoli, we’ve built a smarter, more contextual way to bring runbooks directly into your incident response workflow, so your team can resolve production issues faster, with less friction.
In many setups, engineers receive alerts but still have to spend time figuring out what to do next. Even when a recurring issue is recognized, there’s often no clear documentation or easily accessible guidance attached to it. Randoli helps close this gap by surfacing relevant runbooks right alongside the issue report itself.
Runbooks in Randoli aren’t generic. They are tied to your workload context using selectors like labels, namespaces, resource kinds, and even log analyzer outputs.
For example, if a deployment includes a label like app.kubernetes.io/instance=simulation and it fails due to repeated SLA breaches, Randoli can automatically attach a relevant runbook associated with that condition. This makes it easier for you, especially when you're on-call, to move from alert to resolution without having to dig through internal docs or Slack history.
When incidents happen, just having the information isn't enough. It needs to be organized in a way that’s easy to act on. That’s where Randoli’s runbooks come in. They’re built to help your team document and execute remediation steps clearly, consistently, and in context.
Whether you're restarting a failing deployment, checking container resource usage, or investigating a spike in database latency, you can reference tooling (like kubectl or curl), add SQL queries, and even link to external docs, all in one place This reduces the usual friction of switching tabs, digging through internal wikis, or confirming steps with teammates mid-incident.
Because runbooks in Randoli are scoped using labels and workload metadata, they can adapt to multiple related services, making them living documents that evolve with your systems. What you get isn’t just a static set of instructions, but a trusted, reusable source of operational knowledge, ready when it’s needed most.
No two production environments are exactly the same. While some issues like out-of-memory errors or SLA violations tend to crop up across teams, others are specific to how your infrastructure or services are set up.
That’s why Randoli supports both system-generated and user-created runbooks, giving teams the flexibility to respond to a wide range of operational scenarios.
System-generated runbooks are automatically created for common issues detected in your environment. These cover cases like container crashes, node pressure, or recurring latency problems paired with baseline resolution steps that engineers can quickly follow or customize.
User-provided runbooks, on the other hand, allow teams to document their own best practices for recurring incidents. Whether it’s handling Kafka lag, debugging JVM memory issues, or fine-tuning workload configuration, these runbooks can be tailored to your internal standards and infrastructure.
This helps ensure that even team members with less experience can follow reliable, team-validated guidance when responding to critical issues.
By combining both, teams can respond faster to common issues while continuously building a catalog of knowledge that reflects how their systems actually behave in production.
During an outage, time and clarity are critical. Engineers often need to search through documentation platforms, revisit past resolutions, or check with teammates, actions that are expected, but can slow things down when every second counts. What’s really needed is clear, reliable guidance available right where the issue is being investigated.
That’s what makes Randoli’s approach to runbooks different. By embedding runbooks directly into the incident workflow, matched through selectors like labels, namespaces, and log patterns, it ensures the right troubleshooting guide shows up exactly when it’s needed. Engineers can stay focused, avoid unnecessary context-switching, and start resolving the issue with confidence.
This leads to more than just faster incident response. It reduces escalations, builds consistency across teams, and makes it easier for newer or less experienced team members to contribute during high-pressure situations. Over time, it also helps organizations turn scattered operational knowledge into something structured and repeatable. Therefore, improving reliability without increasing cognitive load.
Reliable systems aren’t built overnight. They’re shaped over time by how teams respond to problems, learn from them, and evolve their processes. In fast-moving environments like Kubernetes, that learning often gets trapped in silos: someone solves an issue during an incident, but the resolution never makes it beyond a Slack thread or a one-off call.
Runbooks offer a way to break that pattern. They turn individual fixes into shared operational knowledge, allowing teams to respond faster, with more consistency, and less guesswork. And when that knowledge is accessible in the exact moment it’s needed i.e. during active troubleshooting, it becomes a force multiplier.
At Randoli, our approach to runbooks is built around that principle. It’s not just about documentation. It’s about making structured knowledge part of your day-to-day operations, so your team isn’t starting from scratch with every incident. The more you document, the more you accelerate future response times and the more resilient your organization becomes.
If you're looking to simplify incident response and build a stronger foundation for operational reliability, you can explore Randoli Observability or start a 30-day free trial to try it out in your own environment.
.png)
.png)
.png){kind=logo}
