Incident Management Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published May 12, 2026 4 min read

The Degraded-Mode Runbook

When the system can't fully serve, what's the safe partial mode? The runbook that defines.

Define modes

Full: all features. Degraded: read-only. Minimal: cached responses only.

Per service. Documented; tested.

Specific signals push into each mode.

Auto-trigger where possible; manual escalation if needed.

Recovery criteria documented. 'When X is true for Y minutes, recover.'

Auto-recover where safe; otherwise human approval.