Operations

Skill 86 of 200

Runbook

Create or update an operational runbook for a recurring task or procedure.

1 minute · 141 words · 4 sections

Install

$ npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins --skill runbook

$ npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

» /plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins

The first command installs just this skill, by the name in its SKILL.md; the second installs the whole repository.

If you see unfamiliar placeholders or need to check which tools are connected, see CONNECTORS.md (opens in a new tab).

Create a step-by-step operational runbook for a recurring task or procedure.

Usage

/runbook $ARGUMENTS

Output

## Runbook: [Task Name]
**Owner:** [Team/Person] | **Frequency:** [Daily/Weekly/Monthly/As Needed]
**Last Updated:** [Date] | **Last Run:** [Date]

### Purpose
[What this runbook accomplishes and when to use it]

### Prerequisites
- [ ] [Access or permission needed]
- [ ] [Tool or system required]
- [ ] [Data or input needed]

### Procedure

#### Step 1: [Name]

[Exact command, action, or instruction]

**Expected result:** [What should happen]
**If it fails:** [What to do]

#### Step 2: [Name]

[Exact command, action, or instruction]

**Expected result:** [What should happen]
**If it fails:** [What to do]

### Verification
- [ ] [How to confirm the task completed successfully]
- [ ] [What to check]

### Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Likely Cause | Fix |
|---------|-------------|-----|
| [What you see] | [Why] | [What to do] |

### Rollback
[How to undo this if something goes wrong]

### Escalation
| Situation | Contact | Method |
|-----------|---------|--------|
| [When to escalate] | [Who] | [How to reach them] |

### History
| Date | Run By | Notes |
|------|--------|-------|
| [Date] | [Person] | [Any issues or observations] |

If Connectors Available

If ~~knowledge base is connected:

Search for existing runbooks to update rather than create from scratch
Publish the completed runbook to your ops wiki

If ~~ITSM is connected:

Link the runbook to related incident types and change requests
Auto-populate escalation contacts from on-call schedules

Tips

Be painfully specific — “Run the script” is not a step. “Run python sync.py --prod --dry-run from the ops server” is.
Include failure modes — What can go wrong at each step and what to do about it.
Test the runbook — Have someone unfamiliar with the process follow it. Fix where they get stuck.

About this skill

Trigger

Create or update an operational runbook for a recurring task or procedure. Use when documenting a task that on-call or ops needs to run repeatably, turning tribal knowledge into exact step-by-step commands, adding troubleshooting and rollback steps to an existing procedure, or writing escalation paths for when things go wrong.

The verbatim description from this skill’s front matter — the string an agent matches on to decide whether to load it.

Colophon for this issue

Colophon

How this issue was made

Source

github.com/anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins, branch main, last pushed 23 September 2026.

Licence

Apache-2.0 — the text of every skill is reproduced unmodified, frontmatter included, under the upstream licence.

Discovery

200 skills found by walking the repository tree for SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. 27 distinct layouts observed: bio-research/skills/*/SKILL.md, cowork-plugin-management/skills/*/SKILL.md, customer-support/skills/*/SKILL.md, data/skills/*/SKILL.md, design/skills/*/SKILL.md, engineering/skills/*/SKILL.md, enterprise-search/skills/*/SKILL.md, finance/skills/*/SKILL.md, human-resources/skills/*/SKILL.md, legal/skills/*/SKILL.md, marketing/skills/*/SKILL.md, operations/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/apollo/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/brand-voice/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/common-room/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/slack/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/contact-center/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/meeting-sdk/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/meeting-sdk/web/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/video-sdk/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/virtual-agent/*/SKILL.md, partner-built/zoom-plugin/skills/zoom-mcp/*/SKILL.md, pdf-viewer/skills/*/SKILL.md, product-management/skills/*/SKILL.md, productivity/skills/*/SKILL.md, sales/skills/*/SKILL.md.

Issue colours

Resolved from the awesome-design-md registry — hue 39°, chroma 0.113. Two accent tones are generated per issue and each is proven against its own ground before it ships: a single accent that passes AA on both light and dark paper is arithmetically impossible.

Typefaces

Display: Copernicus is not available to us; set in Newsreader.

We never load a typeface at request time from a third-party origin, so a brand face we do not already self-host is substituted rather than fetched.

Heading repairs

1 repair applied to this skill so the document has one h1 and no skipped levels:

Removed “/runbook”, a leading h1 that duplicated the skill title.

Spec compliance

53 editorial notes across 41 of 200 skills. They are printed in the margin of each skill rather than as errors here.

and 31 more.

Images

Images inside a skill come from the upstream repository. Where the author gave no alternative text we mark the image decorative rather than inventing a description — a plausible caption we made up is worse than none for the reader who depends on it.

Marketplace

A plugin manifest is published at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json by Anthropic, declaring 120 plugins. It is read for editorial metadata only — never as the skill index, which is always the repository tree.

Signal

Install counts come from skills.sh. They measure downloads, not quality, and an unranked repository is not an unread one.

Agent surfaces

The whole issue is available as one markdown document at /anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins.md, and each skill at its own .md URL.

Publication

Set by Skills Docs from the source repository. Body text is Literata at the reader’s chosen size and measure; code is Geist Mono. Nothing on this page was written by us except this paragraph.

If you see unfamiliar placeholders or need to check which tools are connected, see CONNECTORS.md (opens in a new tab).

Create a step-by-step operational runbook for a recurring task or procedure.

Usage

/runbook $ARGUMENTS

Output

## Runbook: [Task Name]
**Owner:** [Team/Person] | **Frequency:** [Daily/Weekly/Monthly/As Needed]
**Last Updated:** [Date] | **Last Run:** [Date]

### Purpose
[What this runbook accomplishes and when to use it]

### Prerequisites
- [ ] [Access or permission needed]
- [ ] [Tool or system required]
- [ ] [Data or input needed]

### Procedure

#### Step 1: [Name]

[Exact command, action, or instruction]

**Expected result:** [What should happen]
**If it fails:** [What to do]

#### Step 2: [Name]

[Exact command, action, or instruction]

**Expected result:** [What should happen]
**If it fails:** [What to do]

### Verification
- [ ] [How to confirm the task completed successfully]
- [ ] [What to check]

### Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Likely Cause | Fix |
|---------|-------------|-----|
| [What you see] | [Why] | [What to do] |

### Rollback
[How to undo this if something goes wrong]

### Escalation
| Situation | Contact | Method |
|-----------|---------|--------|
| [When to escalate] | [Who] | [How to reach them] |

### History
| Date | Run By | Notes |
|------|--------|-------|
| [Date] | [Person] | [Any issues or observations] |

If Connectors Available

If ~~knowledge base is connected:

Search for existing runbooks to update rather than create from scratch
Publish the completed runbook to your ops wiki

If ~~ITSM is connected:

Link the runbook to related incident types and change requests
Auto-populate escalation contacts from on-call schedules

Tips

Be painfully specific — “Run the script” is not a step. “Run python sync.py --prod --dry-run from the ops server” is.
Include failure modes — What can go wrong at each step and what to do about it.
Test the runbook — Have someone unfamiliar with the process follow it. Fix where they get stuck.