incident-readiness

Production incident readiness is checked by evaluating monitoring, SLO/SLI alignment, runbook coverage, and escalation processes. This ensures SLOs are defined per critical component and mapped to real CloudWatch metrics to prevent surprises during outages.

Validating SLO breach coverage requires confirming CloudWatch alarms exist for each defined SLO. The process checks that alarms map to real AWS metrics and verifies operational runbooks are available for every critical alarm triggered.

A complete incident response process requires postmortem templates, on-call and escalation documentation, and defined error budgets. It also involves checking whether chaos engineering consideration via AWS FIS is integrated into your preparedness reviews.

Yes, incident readiness can target either the full system or a specific component. You provide the component name as an argument to scope the operational readiness assessment to that particular service.

Runbooks are needed for CloudWatch alarms to ensure detection and escalation coverage. They provide documented response procedures for each critical alarm, preventing unstructured reactions when SLO breaches occur in production.