Production Support Playbook (APIs & Integrations)

A practical, reusable playbook for supporting real-world backend systems in production—focused on fast triage, clear communication, root cause analysis (RCA), and prevention of recurring incidents.

It’s written with API + integration-heavy environments in mind (payments-style flows, partner dependencies, retries/timeouts, data correctness), and is intended to be copied into teams and adapted.

What’s inside

• RCA_TEMPLATE.md — a complete RCA template you can reuse

• RUNBOOK_API_INCIDENTS.md — troubleshooting steps for common API incident types

• CHECKLISTS.md — quick checklists for on-call and post-incident actions

• LOGGING_GUIDE_DOTNET.md — structured logging + correlation IDs (Serilog-focused)

• POSTMAN_TRIAGE_GUIDE.md — using Postman effectively during incidents

Quick start

• Handling an incident now? Start with RUNBOOK_API_INCIDENTS.md
• Writing the incident report? Use RCA_TEMPLATE.md
• Improving reliability? Use LOGGING_GUIDE_DOTNET.md and update the checklists

Who it’s for

• Backend developers supporting live systems
• Engineers working on payments/integrations where correctness and stability matter
• Anyone looking to improve incident handling and reduce repeat outages

How to use

1. During an incident: start with RUNBOOK_API_INCIDENTS.md

2. After service is restored: document the RCA using RCA_TEMPLATE.md

3. Improve future response: update checklists/runbooks with lessons learned

License

MIT (recommended) or your preferred license.