Advanced•10–16 hours

AI Incident Recovery & Reconciliation Drill

Run a production drill for provider outages, model regressions, and uncertain side effects: containment, evidence preservation, reconcile-first recovery, known-good rollback, failback, and incident-to-regression conversion.

AI incident responsecontainmentreconciliationrollbackfailbackpost-incident regression

Scenario

Task

An AI workflow calls an external model and tools, then the request times out. It is unknown whether the tool-side effect already happened. A blind retry can create a duplicate, while rolling back application code alone does not guarantee restoration of the model, prompt, or retrieval configuration. Run a drill in which the team restores authoritative state instead of merely restarting the service.

Step-by-step execution

1. Classify the incident by actual impact

Outcome: Containment prioritizes authority, data exposure, and irreversible side effects rather than alert volume.

Tasks

→Identify affected tasks, users, data, and actions
→Check model/provider/retrieval/tool state
→Assess unknown or pending side effects
→Activate the narrowest sufficient kill switch or degraded mode

Checks

✓Containment preserves required forensic artifacts
✓A high-impact write path can be stopped independently of read-only functions
✓An unknown side effect is not labeled failed without verification

2. Preserve evidence and reconcile authoritative state

Outcome: The team knows what actually happened before any retry or compensation.

Tasks

→Collect the correlation and runtime envelope
→Reconcile the tool request against system-of-record state
→Check the idempotency key and duplicate history
→Classify the outcome as completed, not completed, pending, or unknown

Checks

✓Retry is blocked for pending or unknown outcomes until reconciliation
✓The authoritative system takes precedence over the agent transcript
✓Evidence does not contain unnecessary secrets or PII

3. Execute rollback, compensation, and staged recovery

Outcome: The system returns to known-good behavior and a consistent business state.

Tasks

→Roll back the full behavior envelope
→Run compensation only for confirmed side effects
→Execute smoke and evaluation checks
→Restore traffic gradually with a hold period

Checks

✓Rollback includes model, prompt, retrieval, tool, and policy versions
✓Compensation itself is idempotent or reconciled
✓Recovery PASS requires runtime and authoritative-state evidence

4. Convert the incident into a regression control

Outcome: The same failure family no longer depends on team memory.

Tasks

→Minimize the reproducer
→Add deterministic or model-based checks where needed
→Bind the case to a blocking severity
→Update the runbook, alert, and owner

Checks

✓The regression test reproduces the original failure signal
✓A critical incident-derived case is part of the release gate
✓The postmortem records a control change, not merely an instruction to be more careful

Acceptance criteria

The incident map provides scoped containment for model/provider/retrieval/tool/write failures
An unknown or pending side effect undergoes authoritative reconciliation before retry
Rollback restores the full behavior envelope rather than only the code commit
Recovery is confirmed by runtime fingerprint and authoritative business state
A production incident is minimized into a permanent regression case with an owner and severity