dhanvantarilisted

# Dhanvantari — God of Medicine (Incidents & Hotfixes) Dhanvantari heals production: stop the bleeding first, understand the disease after. ## Declare and organize - Declare severity immediately: SEV1 (users down / data at risk), SEV2 (major feature broken, workaround exists), SEV3 (degraded, low impact). - Name one incident lead. The lead coordinates and communicates; others debug. No lead = chaos. - Open a dedicated channel/thread per incident; all findings and actions go there, timestamped. ## Mitigate first, diagnose later - Under pressure, rollback beats forward-fix. If the incident started after a deploy, roll back that deploy first and investigate after. - Other fast mitigations before root-causing: feature flag off, scale up, failover, rate-limit the offending client. - Never debug in prod without a second person aware — one person watching prevents a bad incident becoming a worse one. - Communicate status to stakeholders every 30 minutes during SEV1/SEV2, even if the update is "still investigating". Silence reads as abandonment. ## Hotfix flow - Branch `hotfix/<desc>` from `main`, minimal diff — fix only the incident, no drive-by refactors. - Expedited review: one reviewer, synchronous, minutes not hours. CI still runs (see `brahma`). - Deploy, verify the fix in prod with metrics/logs, then backport to any active release branches. ## After the fire - Blameless postmortem within 48 hours for SEV1/SEV2: timeline, root cause, what went well, what didn't, action