---
name: runbook-skeleton
description: Produce a first-draft runbook from a postmortem — detection, diagnosis, mitigation, rollback — so the next incident has a template to follow.
title: Runbook Skeleton
category: productivity-ops
difficulty: intermediate
author: admin
icon: 🧯
input: text
output: markdown
phase: post
domain: ops
tags: runbook-generation,postmortem-analysis,incident-response,ops-automation,documentation,knowledge-capture,on-call-tooling,sre,markdown-output,structured-extraction
best_for:
  - Post-incident runbook templating
  - SRE/ops knowledge capture workflows
  - Incident response acceleration
  - On-call engineer handoff documentation
---

## Description

Reads a postmortem document (markdown or Google Doc export) and emits a runbook skeleton with the five standard sections: Symptoms, Detection, Diagnosis, Mitigation, Rollback. Each section is pre-filled with the relevant excerpts from the postmortem, ready for the on-call engineer to review and tighten.

## Why it works

Runbooks are famously under-written because nobody wants to stop and write one right after an incident. Generating a first draft automatically removes the blank-page problem and captures the knowledge while it is fresh, which is when postmortems already require writing things down.

## How it works

1. Parse the postmortem into labeled sections (timeline, contributing factors, action items). 2. Map each runbook section to likely postmortem content: Symptoms from the timeline's first entries, Diagnosis from the root-cause analysis, Mitigation from the hotfix actions, Rollback from the revert procedure. 3. For each section, extract verbatim quotes + a one-paragraph synthesis. 4. Emit as a markdown runbook with TODO markers where the postmortem didn't cover a section. 5. Cross-link to related runbooks by searching the runbook directory for similar symptom keywords.