Exa Incident Runbook

Overview

Rapid incident response procedures for Exa-related outages.

Prerequisites

• Access to Exa dashboard and status page

• kubectl access to production cluster

• Prometheus/Grafana access

• Communication channels (Slack, PagerDuty)

Severity Levels

Level Definition Response Time Examples

P1 Complete outage < 15 min Exa API unreachable

P2 Degraded service < 1 hour High latency, partial failures

P3 Minor impact < 4 hours Webhook delays, non-critical errors

P4 No user impact Next business day Monitoring gaps

Quick Triage

set -euo pipefail

1. Check Exa status

curl -s https://status.exa.com | jq

2. Check our integration health

curl -s https://api.yourapp.com/health | jq '.services.exa'

3. Check error rate (last 5 min)

curl -s localhost:9090/api/v1/query?query=rate(exa_errors_total[5m]) # 9090: Prometheus port

4. Recent error logs

kubectl logs -l app=exa-integration --since=5m | grep -i error | tail -20

Decision Tree

Exa API returning errors? ├─ YES: Is status.exa.com showing incident? │ ├─ YES → Wait for Exa to resolve. Enable fallback. │ └─ NO → Our integration issue. Check credentials, config. └─ NO: Is our service healthy? ├─ YES → Likely resolved or intermittent. Monitor. └─ NO → Our infrastructure issue. Check pods, memory, network.

Immediate Actions by Error Type

401/403 - Authentication

set -euo pipefail

Verify API key is set

kubectl get secret exa-secrets -o jsonpath='{.data.api-key}' | base64 -d

Check if key was rotated

→ Verify in Exa dashboard

Remediation: Update secret and restart pods

kubectl create secret generic exa-secrets --from-literal=api-key=NEW_KEY --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f - kubectl rollout restart deployment/exa-integration

429 - Rate Limited

set -euo pipefail

Check rate limit headers

curl -v https://api.exa.com 2>&1 | grep -i rate

Enable request queuing

kubectl set env deployment/exa-integration RATE_LIMIT_MODE=queue

Long-term: Contact Exa for limit increase

500/503 - Exa Errors

set -euo pipefail

Enable graceful degradation

kubectl set env deployment/exa-integration EXA_FALLBACK=true

Notify users of degraded service

Update status page

Monitor Exa status for resolution

Communication Templates

Internal (Slack)

🔴 P1 INCIDENT: Exa Integration Status: INVESTIGATING Impact: [Describe user impact] Current action: [What you're doing] Next update: [Time] Incident commander: @[name]

External (Status Page)

Exa Integration Issue

We're experiencing issues with our Exa integration. Some users may experience [specific impact].

We're actively investigating and will provide updates.

Last updated: [timestamp]

Post-Incident

Evidence Collection

set -euo pipefail

Generate debug bundle

./scripts/exa-debug-bundle.sh

Export relevant logs

kubectl logs -l app=exa-integration --since=1h > incident-logs.txt

Capture metrics

curl "localhost:9090/api/v1/query_range?query=exa_errors_total&start=2h" > metrics.json # 9090: Prometheus port

Postmortem Template

Incident: Exa [Error Type]

Date: YYYY-MM-DD Duration: X hours Y minutes Severity: P[1-4]

Summary

[1-2 sentence description]

Timeline

• HH:MM - [Event]
• HH:MM - [Event]

Root Cause

[Technical explanation]

Impact

• Users affected: N
• Revenue impact: $X

Action Items

• [Preventive measure] - Owner - Due date

Instructions

Step 1: Quick Triage

Run the triage commands to identify the issue source.

Step 2: Follow Decision Tree

Determine if the issue is Exa-side or internal.

Step 3: Execute Immediate Actions

Apply the appropriate remediation for the error type.

Step 4: Communicate Status

Update internal and external stakeholders.

Output

• Issue identified and categorized

• Remediation applied

• Stakeholders notified

• Evidence collected for postmortem

Error Handling

Issue Cause Solution

Can't reach status page Network issue Use mobile or VPN

kubectl fails Auth expired Re-authenticate

Metrics unavailable Prometheus down Check backup metrics

Secret rotation fails Permission denied Escalate to admin

Examples

One-Line Health Check

set -euo pipefail curl -sf https://api.yourapp.com/health | jq '.services.exa.status' || echo "UNHEALTHY"

Resources

• Exa Status Page

• Exa Support

Next Steps

For data handling, see exa-data-handling .