Service Production Readiness Review

Pre-launch inspection to verify a service is ready for production, including monitoring, alerting, runbooks, on-call ownership, scaling, and security controls before go-live.

Review Details

• Service name and version identified
  Record the service name, release version, and environment being reviewed.
• Review date and launch target documented
  Capture the readiness review date and planned production go-live date.
• Review owner assigned
  Identify the person responsible for coordinating the readiness review and closure of deficiencies.

Monitoring and Alerting

• Production metrics are defined and visible
  Confirm key service health metrics are available in dashboards, including latency, error rate, traffic, saturation, and availability.
• Alert thresholds are documented and tuned
  Verify alert thresholds are based on meaningful service signals and are not generating excessive false positives or alert fatigue.
• Alert routing reaches the correct on-call channel
  Confirm alerts route to the intended paging, chat, or ticketing destination for the owning team.
• Synthetic or health checks are in place
  Verify automated health checks or synthetic transactions exist to detect service degradation quickly.

Runbooks and Incident Response

• Operational runbook is published and current
  Confirm the runbook includes startup, shutdown, common failure modes, escalation steps, and recovery actions.
• Incident escalation path is documented
  Verify the escalation path identifies who to contact, when to escalate, and how to engage additional support.
• Rollback or mitigation procedure is tested
  Confirm a rollback, feature flag disablement, or mitigation plan has been validated for launch failure scenarios.
• Known launch risks and open defects are tracked
  Document any accepted risks, unresolved defects, or temporary workarounds that remain before go-live.

Ownership and Support Readiness

• Primary on-call owner is assigned
  Record the primary on-call owner or team responsible for production support at launch.
• Secondary escalation contact is assigned
  Record the backup responder or escalation contact for after-hours or high-severity incidents.
• Support handoff completed
  Confirm operations, support, and engineering teams have completed the launch handoff and understand support boundaries.
• On-call schedule covers launch window
  Verify the on-call schedule provides coverage for the launch period, including weekends or holidays if applicable.

Scaling, Capacity, and Resilience

• Load or capacity test completed
  Confirm the service has been tested at expected peak load and the results meet performance targets.
• Autoscaling or capacity controls configured
  Verify scaling rules, resource limits, or capacity reservations are configured for expected demand.
• Single points of failure reviewed
  Confirm major dependencies, regions, queues, databases, or third-party services have been reviewed for resilience risks.
• Recovery time and recovery point objectives documented
  Record the approved RTO and RPO for the service, if applicable.

Security and Compliance

• Access controls follow least privilege
  Confirm production access is limited to approved users, roles, and service accounts.
• Secrets and credentials are stored securely
  Verify secrets are not hardcoded and are managed through approved secret storage or key management controls.
• Security review or sign-off completed
  Confirm the service has completed the required security assessment, vulnerability review, or approval gate before launch.
• Open security findings documented
  Capture any remaining security findings that have been accepted for launch with an approved remediation plan.