Mawrooth · RB-MWPUSH

Push Notification Outbox — incident runbook

Runbook hubMawrooth console

Push Notification Outbox is monitored by Push fan-out monitor on push 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 push outbox backlog ≥ 40 items, critical at ≥ 120 items. Critical means user-visible impact: page the escalation owner.

dashboard: sim://grafana/mw-pushlogs: sim://logs/mw-pushowner: Notification Teamrunbook: RB-MWPUSH

Signals & thresholds

  • Primary metric: push outbox backlog (items)
  • Warning threshold: ≥ 40 items
  • Critical threshold: ≥ 120 items
  • Dashboard: sim://grafana/mw-push
  • Log source: sim://logs/mw-push
  • SLA: 99.5% monthly availability
  • SLO: 99.9% of requests under warning threshold
  • External dependencies: Browser & Mobile Push (FCM / APNs), Apple App Store Billing, Google Play Billing

1. Detection

  1. Push fan-out monitor reports push outbox backlog above the warning threshold — messages are not reaching recipients.
  2. Bounce or rejection volume rises at the provider.

2. Triage

  1. Check provider status and recent response codes for Browser & Mobile Push (FCM / APNs), Apple App Store Billing, Google Play Billing.
  2. Separate hard rejections (invalid recipient, suppression) from provider-side failures.
  3. Check domain authentication and sending reputation if rejections are widespread.

3. Mitigation

  1. Queue outbound messages with backoff instead of dropping them.
  2. Suppress retry storms on hard failures.
  3. Notify the business owner if time-sensitive notices are delayed.

4. Verification

  1. Confirm push outbox backlog has been below the warning threshold for at least 10 minutes.
  2. Confirm the affected business services are healthy on the dashboard.
  3. Confirm no alerts remain open for this component and its downstream consumers.
  4. Spot-check one real end-to-end operation through the affected flow.

5. Rollback / restore

  1. If a deploy caused the incident, roll back to the previous release and re-verify.
  2. If a configuration or threshold change caused it, restore the previous value and record why.
  3. Re-enable any job, feature flag or channel that was paused during mitigation, one at a time.

Escalation path

  • 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)

Push NotificationsWedding Announcements

External dependencies

Browser & Mobile Push (FCM / APNs) — Push notification fan-out

Apple App Store Billing — In-app purchase receipts and server notifications

Google Play Billing — In-app purchase receipts and developer notifications

Simulated incidents that exercise this runbook

Push fan-out backlog — Push outbox not draining; reminders and congratulations delayed.

Reporting notes

  • 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.