Runbooks

What?

Today on the Fediverse I stumbled upon someone asking for resources on creating good runbooks. This reminded me of a prior thought of myself where I wanted to create a list of runbooks without knowing the term (I didn't start back then, but more of a tendency to have too high demands on my first-tries, so maybe I should create a runbook for that...) so I thought there might be low-lifes like myself out there who are helped by this.

How?

But since the very obvious next question seems to be how to organize that type of notes I will explain my first idea and be very open for feedback and suggestions. My basic idea without much investigation is to use vimwiki, a tool I already grew quite comfortable with. There I will have a hierarchicaly sorted list of runbooks so I won't have to search too long for any specific one. Each runbook will then be represented by a page in the vimwiki with a list of tasks to do. However this so far only covers linear runbooks, as in "put on you pants, then your shoes.". It doesn't cover runbooks that include decisions which imediatly reminded me of flowcharts which I need to represent in one form or another. The idea for that is start any part with a list of tasks (nothing new here), and end with the next decision to make and links to the lists of tasks that are next on, depending on the answer.

Why am I talking about posts within themselves? I don't know but I am. Now.

If you think this is not very sophisticated I share your opinion but to me it seems to be a common struggle to battle the voice saying "It can't be that easy, there MUST be a catch!". So this short write-up also is supposed to support you with this struggle and I hope one day I will forget to write these things up as we all progress. :) Any further thoughts on the topic should be under the tag #runbooks-meta and runbooks I feel comfortable enough to share with #runbooks.

Tags: runbooks, runbooks-meta