---
title: "Playbook — Definition | FourSight Glossary"
url: https://foursight.cloud/glossary/playbook
description: "A broader process document covering how a team responds to incidents in general — severity rubric, roles, comms templates, post-mortem requirements. Dis…"
lang: en
---

Back to glossary: https://foursight.cloud/glossary

Incidents & On-Call

# Playbook

A broader process document covering how a team responds to incidents in general — severity rubric, roles, comms templates, post-mortem requirements. Distinct from a runbook, which is alert-specific.

Source

- PagerDuty — Incident Response Documentation (https://response.pagerduty.com/)

Related guide: Building an Incident Response Playbook: https://foursight.cloud/guides/incident-response-playbook

## Related terms

Incident

An unplanned event that disrupts service or threatens to.
https://foursight.cloud/glossary/incident

Severity (SEV-1 to SEV-4)

A standardized scale for how serious an incident is.
https://foursight.cloud/glossary/severity

Incident Commander (IC)

The single person who owns coordination of an incident end-to-end.
https://foursight.cloud/glossary/incident-commander

Tech Lead (during incident)

The engineer actively diagnosing and fixing the problem during an incident.
https://foursight.cloud/glossary/tech-lead

Comms Lead

Owns customer-facing communication during an incident — status page updates, in-product banners, support te…
https://foursight.cloud/glossary/comms-lead

On-Call Rotation

A scheduled rotation of engineers who are responsible for responding to alerts outside business hours.
https://foursight.cloud/glossary/on-call-rotation

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