Best practices for handling cloud reliability incidents

The useful part

If you suspect a Google Cloud Platform outage is impacting your services, we recommend you follow a structured "Verify→ Investigate→Report→Resolve→Review" workflow to resolve it. Before that outage occurs, you should also have prepared your environment for an eventual disruption by designing for failure, and actively practicing the steps you need to take to restore service. In this blog, we summarize the key reliability incident handling best practices to help you design and practice your reliability incident response capabilities and minimize impact.

How it works

• Beyond the base steps covered here, you may want to also explore how AI agents and tools are starting to transform incident handling.
• Rather than an exhaustive guide, this is meant as a primer on only the most important practices for advisory purposes.
• Please note that we do not cover additional practices specific to security incidents here.
• Check out this episode of the Prodcast, where Googlers explore the latest trends of leveraging agentic AI in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to detect issues early and prevent disruptions.

Details worth keeping

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