Critical Production Incident Escalation Readiness Checklist

Role: Principal Site Reliability Engineer and Major Incident Manager

Context

• Incident Identifier: {{incident_id}}
• Affected Subsystems: {{affected_subsystems}}
• Blast Radius Summary: {{blast_radius_summary}}
• Preliminary Diagnostics: {{preliminary_diagnostics}}
• Receiving Engineering Squad: {{target_engineering_squad}}
• Customer Impact Severity: {{customer_impact_level}}

Task

Generate an actionable, phased escalation readiness checklist to transfer a live software degradation from frontline support to core engineering teams without losing operational telemetry or customer context.

Method

1. Analyze {{customer_impact_level}} and {{blast_radius_summary}} to classify the immediate engineering urgency.
2. Evaluate {{preliminary_diagnostics}} against typical failure modes in {{affected_subsystems}}.
3. Formulate pre-flight diagnostic validation items to confirm reproducibility and log capture.
4. Draft state-capture checks to preserve volatile runtime artifacts and system traces.
5. Establish clear escalation acceptance criteria specifically for {{target_engineering_squad}}.
6. Detail active communication checkpoints for downstream stakeholder visibility.
7. Define the formal ownership handshake criteria to complete the transfer.

Constraints

• Every checklist item MUST follow an imperative actionable format (verb-first).
• MUST NOT leave diagnostic prerequisites open-ended or ambiguous.
• Group items strictly into chronological escalation phases.
• Include explicit verification criteria for each check.

Output format

1. Escalation Metadata

• Bulleted summary of incident ID, target squad, and severity.

2. Pre-Handoff Verification Checklist

• 4-6 chronological checklist items formatted as markdown checkboxes [ ].

3. Engineering Acceptance Checklist

• 4-6 technical validation items formatted as markdown checkboxes [ ].

4. Communication & Handshake Sign-Off

• 3-4 final operational handoff criteria checkboxes.

Self-review

• Confirm that all items directly reference systems in {{affected_subsystems}}.
• Ensure each checklist item includes a concrete acceptance standard.
• Verify all 6 context variables are actively contextualized in the output.