Glean Incident Runbook

Overview

Incident response procedures for Glean enterprise search integration failures. Covers search degradation, connector sync failures, indexing backlogs, and permission sync drift. Glean aggregates knowledge across all company tools, so incidents impact employee productivity across the entire organization. When search breaks or returns stale results, teams lose access to critical institutional knowledge. Classify severity immediately and follow the matching playbook below.

Severity Levels

Diagnostic Steps

# Test search API health
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "HTTP %{http_code}\n" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GLEAN_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -X POST https://your-domain.glean.com/api/v1/search \
  -d '{"query": "test", "pageSize": 1}'

# Check datasource connector status
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $GLEAN_API_TOKEN" \
  https://your-domain.glean.com/api/v1/getdatasourceconfig \
  -d '{"datasource": "DATASOURCE_NAME"}' | jq '.status'

# Verify indexing queue depth
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $GLEAN_API_TOKEN" \
  https://your-domain.glean.com/api/index/v1/getstatus | jq '.statistics'

Incident Playbooks

API Outage

1. Confirm outage with diagnostic curl above and check Glean status page
2. Verify your Glean instance URL resolves and TLS cert is valid
3. Test from multiple networks to rule out local DNS or firewall issues
4. Notify users that search is temporarily unavailable
5. Contact Glean support with instance name, timestamps, and error codes

Authentication Failure

1. Verify API token is set: echo $GLEAN_API_TOKEN | wc -c
2. Check token expiry — Glean tokens may have a TTL configured by your admin
3. Test with a minimal search request (see diagnostics above)
4. If 401: regenerate token in Glean admin console under API settings
5. If 403: verify token scopes include search and indexing permissions

Data Sync Failure

1. Identify which connector failed via getdatasourceconfig for each source
2. Check connector credentials — OAuth tokens for Google/Slack/Confluence may have expired
3. Review connector error logs in Glean admin under Datasource Management
4. Re-authorize the connector if credentials expired
5. Trigger a manual re-crawl for the affected datasource
6. Monitor indexing status until backlog clears

Communication Template

**Incident**: Glean Search [Outage/Degradation]
**Status**: [Investigating/Identified/Mitigating/Resolved]
**Started**: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM UTC
**Impact**: [Search unavailable / results stale since HH:MM / N datasources not syncing]
**Current action**: [Connector re-auth in progress / Glean support engaged / manual re-crawl running]
**Next update**: HH:MM UTC

Post-Incident

• [ ] Document timeline from detection to resolution
• [ ] Identify root cause (connector auth expiry / Glean platform issue / indexing bottleneck)
• [ ] Audit all connector credentials for upcoming expirations
• [ ] Verify permission sync is accurate post-recovery
• [ ] Add alerting for connector sync age thresholds
• [ ] Schedule review of datasource health dashboard weekly

Error Handling

Prerequisites

• An incident owner, an approved support path, and a synthetic probe query that reveals no customer or employee content.
• Read-only diagnostic credentials scoped to the affected staging or production datasource; never paste tokens, queries, document titles, or result snippets into incident chat.
• A known-good baseline for connector freshness, permission-sync age, and the change window that preceded the incident.

Instructions

1. Open a timestamped incident record and classify impact using the severity table; preserve only error codes and aggregate counts.
2. Run the synthetic health probe, then isolate the failing boundary: identity, search endpoint, source connector, index backlog, or ACL synchronization.
3. Freeze nonessential connector configuration changes while the owner compares the affected source's ACL watermark with the source system.
4. Apply the smallest reversible remediation (for example, reauthorize one connector or queue a scoped resync), observe the synthetic probe and freshness metrics, and stop if access expands unexpectedly.
5. Close only after a second, least-privilege test identity receives the expected allow and deny outcomes. Record the rollback used or explicitly record that no change was made.

Output

Produce an incident receipt containing the severity, UTC start and resolution times, affected datasource identifiers, redacted error codes, remediation and rollback decision, and the two synthetic authorization outcomes. Keep raw search results, user identifiers, and document content out of the receipt.

Examples

For a stale staging-handbook connector, record: P2; source=staging-handbook; sync_age=6h; action=scoped_reauthorize; probe=healthy; allow_test=pass; deny_test=pass. This proves recovery without exposing a real query or document.

Resources

• Glean Developer Portal
• Indexing API
• Search API

Next Steps

See glean-observability for monitoring setup and connector health dashboards.