Runbooks rendered where the on-call actually sees them.
Attach the 3am instructions to each monitor. Rendered on the incident page and inside every alert payload — email, Slack, SMS, webhook. Markdown supported. Included on every tier.
When this feature earns its keep.
Three concrete patterns. Use them as templates for your own setup.
Database failover steps
Pin the exact psql commands to run when the primary fails. The runbook shows up in the Slack page at 3am, so the on-call doesn't have to remember which wiki page held the procedure.
Escalation playbook
Document who to call after the basic triage doesn't work. The runbook is also the post-mortem starting point — every incident references it, and changes get reviewed in the same PR as the monitor config.
Vendor-specific quirks
'Stripe sometimes returns 502s during their EU maintenance window — wait 5 minutes before paging.' Pin it once on the Stripe-webhook monitor; the on-call sees it every time the monitor fires.
How it works.
Write markdown. Paste into the runbook field on a monitor. The text renders inline on the incident page and inside every alert payload.
Wires into every monitor type and every alert channel. See all platform features
Open the monitor
Any monitor type — cron, HTTP, TCP, SSL, DNS, or push. The runbook field is the same shape on all six.
Paste your runbook
Free-form markdown: headings, lists, code blocks, tables, links. 16 KiB cap — plenty for a procedure. For longer content, paste a URL to your wiki and link out.
Save
Renders on the incident detail page in the dashboard AND inside the body of every alert delivered to Slack, email, SMS, or a webhook channel. No extra config.
FAQ
- Does markdown render in the alert payload too?
- Yes — for email and Slack (which support rich text). SMS and webhooks get the raw markdown text; we don't render it because SMS doesn't support rich text and webhooks are consumed by your own pipeline.
- How long can a runbook be?
- 16 KiB — a few thousand words. Enough for a detailed procedure but not enough to paste a novel. For longer content, link out to your wiki / Notion / Confluence from inside the runbook.
- Can I version-control runbooks?
- Yes — runbook content is part of the monitor's wire shape, so it round-trips through the API and through Terraform. Pin the canonical version in git and apply changes via your normal review process.