The Playbook: An Essential Tool

Creating a playbook is essential for any technology team handling incidents or operational tasks in today’s fast-paced, complex cloud environments. At Samtek, we specialize in cloud-native application and platform development, security, data center migration, and cloud operations. Playbooks are a critical component to the solutions we deliver.

Why Playbooks Matter

Before we talk about how to create a playbook, let’s explore why a playbook is necessary. When an organization is faced with a failure, performance issue, or security incident, it’s not uncommon for varying responses to lead to increased risk and slow recovery. Playbooks help standardize how teams act, ensuring a reliable response and swift resolution.

A playbook is a structured guide detailing how to:

• investigate incidents
• analyze impact
• determine root causes

Playbooks are different from runbooks. You need both, and by leveraging each appropriately, you can respond in a more timely, effective way. Playbooks are typically for scenarios like outages, security events, or performance bottlenecks.

In contrast, a runbook is a step-by-step checklist for achieving a specific technical outcome like scaling resources, restarting a service, or performing a routine deployment. Leveraging playbooks and runbooks together makes your team stronger, more agile, and ready for the inevitable challenges.

What Makes an Effective Playbook?

An effective playbook should:

• Guide the user, step by step, through the process of discovery, starting with what steps you should take to diagnose an incident
• Indicate special tools or permissions you may need
• Contain a communication plan to update stakeholders
• Have an escalation plan for when you can’t identify the root cause
• Link to runbooks for technical fixes
• Be regularly maintained in a central repository

Building an Effective Playbook in 7 Steps

Here’s how you can build an effective playbook to help your team problem solve effectively:

1. Create a repository: Create a version-controlled repository to store playbooks.
2. Identify common scenarios: Start issues your team encounters often and understands.
3. Use a template: Populate a markdown-based playbook template, starting with the “Playbook Name” and “Playbook Info” sections.
4. Document troubleshooting steps: Clearly outline what to do and where to look.
5. Validate with peers: Have another team member test the playbook to make sure it makes sense.
6. Publish and share: Finalize the playbook and share it with stakeholders.
7. Expand and automate: As your playbook library grows, automate key steps using tools like AWS Systems Manager Automation to synchronize playbooks with automation workflows. If you’re going to automatically trigger your playbooks to execute automatically, take some time to identify triggering events to test the automated execution.

The Results of Implementing Playbooks

Simply stated, playbooks help teams function better. Teams that implement robust playbooks:

• respond to incidents faster
• reduce manual errors
• strengthen operational excellence

When paired with automation and runbooks, playbooks enable quicker responses, easier onboarding, and greater reliability, even as environments scale.

Lessons Learned & Best Practices

At Samtek, we’ve seen playbooks create real value across multiple domains while reducing business impact from operational disruptions. Here are some of the lessons learned and best practices captured during this process.

• Clarify roles: Define responsibilities for each task, escalation, and communication channel during incidents.
• Include investigation steps: Document how to collect data to identify root causes. For example, you might create logs, metrics, or user reports.
• Provide decision paths: Include conditional flows—if a certain metric is high, guide the responder toward further actions or related runbooks.
• Link to runbooks: Reference detailed runbooks for remediation once causes are confirmed.
• List tools and resources: Include scripts, dashboards, reference materials, communication templates, and escalation contacts.
• Validate continuously: Test playbooks during practice sessions or “game days,” updating them with new lessons or technologies.
• Use version control: Store playbooks in a central repository, like AWS Systems Manager or Git, and maintain version history.
• Build Automation: Use AWS Well-Architected Labs and Systems Manager Automation to maintain, share, and automate both playbooks and runbooks for long-term success.

What Playbooks Have We Used?

Below are some playbook examples that have help us successfully serve our clients:

• Feature rollout playbook: Guides secure, reliable, and operationally sound rollout of new features and services.
• Disaster recovery playbook: Defines strategies for failover, traffic routing, monitoring, logging, alerting, and regular DR testing.
• Onboarding playbook: Streamlines onboarding new applications into AWS environments.
• Trend Micro playbook: Provides structured procedures for security platform management.
• Keeper offboarding playbook: Defines processes for decommissioning user access securely.
• AWS identity center playbooks: Standardizes identity and access management operations.
• Incident response playbooks: Ensures consistent investigation, communication, and escalation for security and operational incidents.

Not sure where to start?

Start by identifying your most frequent incidents or operational challenges. Then, use this sample outline to create your playbook.

• Introduction & scope
• Roles & responsibilities
• Investigation workflows (with branch logic)
• Decision trees & escalation paths
• Communication templates & notification steps
• Linked runbooks for verified actions
• Feedback section & version history

Most importantly, draft your playbook collaboratively and share it with your team for review so that your team can focus on solving problems, not guessing next steps.