SMS Service is monitored by SMS outbox monitor on SMS outbox backlog. It is owned by Notification Team and serves the business services listed below. Use this runbook when an alert fires on this component.
Warning at SMS outbox backlog ≥ 40 items, critical at ≥ 120 items. Critical means user-visible impact: page the escalation owner.
dashboard: sim://grafana/sms-svclogs: sim://logs/sms-svcowner: Notification Teamrunbook: RB-SMSSVC
- Primary metric: SMS outbox backlog (items)
- Warning threshold: ≥ 40 items
- Critical threshold: ≥ 120 items
- Dashboard: sim://grafana/sms-svc
- Log source: sim://logs/sms-svc
- SLA: 99.5% monthly availability
- SLO: 99.9% of requests under warning threshold
- External dependencies: Unifonic SMS
- SMS outbox monitor reports SMS outbox backlog above the warning threshold.
- Error volume for this component rises in the log source and error reports.
- Group recent errors in sim://logs/sms-svc by message and pick the dominant class.
- Determine whether errors are user-input related, permission related or infrastructure related.
- Check whether the failure is confined to one tenant, one flow or one release.
- Confirm whether upstream dependencies are healthy before treating this as a local defect.
- If a recent release correlates, roll it back.
- Disable the specific failing feature path with the feature flag if one exists.
- Queue and retry failed operations instead of discarding them.
- Communicate the affected flow to operators with a manual workaround where possible.
- Confirm SMS outbox backlog has been below the warning threshold for at least 10 minutes.
- Confirm the affected business services are healthy on the dashboard.
- Confirm no alerts remain open for this component and its downstream consumers.
- Spot-check one real end-to-end operation through the affected flow.
- If a deploy caused the incident, roll back to the previous release and re-verify.
- If a configuration or threshold change caused it, restore the previous value and record why.
- Re-enable any job, feature flag or channel that was paused during mitigation, one at a time.
- First responder: NOC on duty — acknowledge within 5 minutes.
- Component owner: Notification Team.
- Escalation owner (page on critical): Notification Team.
- Escalate if the metric is still critical 15 minutes after mitigation, or if data integrity is in doubt.
- Declare a major incident if two or more critical components are alerting at the same time.
Blast radius — business services affected (2)
SMS MessagingRental Contract Signing
Unifonic SMS — SMS one-time codes and operational messages
Simulated incidents that exercise this runbook
No scenario in the simulation targets this component directly.
- Record start time, actions taken and recovery time in the incident record.
- Attach the dashboard screenshot and the dominant error message to the postmortem.
- Content drafted for the monitoring demo — confirm the exact commands with the owning team before production use.