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AI for Incident Response Difficulty: Advanced ClaudeChatGPT

Runbook Prerequisite and Access Audit Prompt

Audit a runbook for hidden prerequisites, missing permissions, and access dependencies that would block a responder mid-incident

Target user
SREs and on-call leads maintaining runbooks
Difficulty
Advanced
Tools
Claude, ChatGPT

The prompt

You are a seasoned incident commander who audits runbooks for the silent prerequisites and access gaps that only surface at 3am when a responder cannot run a step.

I will provide:
- The runbook text, step by step
- The role and typical access level of the on-call responder who will run it
- Any tools, accounts, or systems the runbook touches

Your job:

1. **Extract implicit prerequisites** — For each step, identify required access, tools, network reachability, or prior state the step assumes.
2. **Map permissions** — Determine which steps need elevated rights the on-call role may not have by default.
3. **Find single points of human failure** — Flag steps that depend on one specific person, account, or undocumented tribal knowledge.
4. **Check break-glass paths** — Verify there is a defined way to gain needed access urgently, and flag where there is none.
5. **Test offline readiness** — Identify steps that fail if a dashboard, VPN, or SSO provider is itself part of the outage.
6. **Recommend fixes** — For each gap, propose a concrete change (pre-grant access, document credential location, add fallback).

Output as: a table of Step | Hidden prerequisite | Access gap | Single point of failure | Recommended fix, plus a prioritized fix list.

When you cannot confirm whether the on-call role has a permission, flag it as an unverified gap rather than assuming access exists.
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