Runbooks, paging ownership, and error budgets should ship with the service template, not after the first overnight outage.
OperationsPublished 2026-09-22Updated 2026-09-221 min
sre
incidents
reliability
Most incident chaos is missing ownership, not missing tools.
## Ship the operating contract
Every new service needs an owner, a paging path, and a minimum runbook before production traffic.
## Prefer boring alerts
Alert on user-facing symptoms and SLO burn. Noise trains people to ignore pages.
## Practice recovery
Game days beat documentation that nobody has opened during a real outage.