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Service Runbook Staleness Audit and Update Generator

aka “Runbook Freshness Checker

Find stale runbooks before they fail during an incident

Runbooks go stale quietly. Deploy paths change, services move, dependencies get renamed, and the doc only gets noticed at 3 a.m. when it points to infrastructure that no longer exists. This recipe finds runbooks that have not kept up with the services they describe and proposes updates based on recent service changes.

House RecipeWork10 min
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PROMPT

Audit service runbooks for freshness and operational drift. Goal: Help me find runbooks that are likely out of date so I can fix them before they fail during a real incident. Ask me for: - The Google Drive folder where runbooks live - Stale thresholds: days since last edit and minimum service activity - Which services to scope the audit to, if any - Whether to create Linear tickets for top stale runbooks Use available integrations this way: - Google Drive: list runbook docs, last edit date, and last editor - GitHub: pull commit and deploy activity for each service referenced in a runbook - PagerDuty: identify which services page most often (those runbooks need to be right) - Linear: create tickets for the highest-risk stale runbooks with proposed owners - Slack: post a summary to the team channel - Google Docs: write the audit report Output: 1. A ranked list of stale runbooks with last-edit date, last editor, and activity gap 2. For each stale runbook: a summary of what has changed in the service since the last edit 3. Suggested updates with diffs against the current runbook text where possible 4. Linear tickets for the top stale runbooks 5. A Slack summary for the team 6. The full audit report in Google Docs Rules: - Do not edit any runbook directly; produce proposed diffs only - Do not delete a runbook even if it appears unused - Cross-reference paging frequency before ranking; high-paging runbooks are higher priority - If a runbook references a deleted service, flag it for archive review, not deletion - Respect Drive permissions; do not surface runbooks I do not have access to

How It Works

This recipe audits your runbook set for operational drift. It scans

Google Drive for runbook docs, compares them with recent GitHub

activity on the services they describe, and flags the docs most

likely to be wrong. The core signal is simple: the service changed,

but the runbook did not.

What You Get

  • Stale runbook list ranked by likelihood of being inaccurate
  • For each stale runbook: what changed in the service since the last edit
  • Suggested updates with diffs against the current text
  • Linear tickets for the highest-risk runbooks
  • Short Slack summary for the team channel

Setup Steps

  1. Ask OpenClaw to run the "Runbook Freshness Checker" recipe using the prompt below
  2. Connect Google Drive, GitHub, PagerDuty, Linear, and Slack
  3. Tell the agent which Drive folder your runbooks live in
  4. Set a stale threshold (default: not edited in 90 days while the service has shipped 5+ deploys)
  5. Review the results and assign owners for the top updates

Tips

  • Prioritize runbooks used during real incidents over the long tail.
  • A runbook nobody uses may also be stale. Archive candidates should still be reviewed.
  • Pair this audit with a quarterly runbook review so it does not depend on memory.
  • Updated does not mean tested. Schedule game days for critical runbooks.
Tags:#devops#sre#runbooks#documentation#operations#reliability

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