Apollo Incident Runbook

Overview

Structured incident response for Apollo.io API failures. Covers severity classification, quick diagnosis, circuit breaker implementation, graceful degradation, and post-incident review. Apollo's public status page is at status.apollo.io.

Prerequisites

• Valid Apollo API key
• Access to monitoring dashboards

Instructions

Step 1: Classify Severity

Severity | Criteria                                    | Response Time
---------+---------------------------------------------+--------------
P1       | Apollo API completely unreachable            | 15 min
         | All enrichments/searches returning 5xx       |
P2       | Partial failures (>10% error rate)           | 1 hour
         | Rate limiting blocking critical workflows    |
P3       | Intermittent errors (<10%), degraded latency | 4 hours
         | Non-critical endpoint failures               |
P4       | Cosmetic issues, minor data inconsistencies  | Next sprint

Step 2: Quick Diagnosis Script

#!/bin/bash
# scripts/apollo-diagnosis.sh
set -euo pipefail
echo "=== Apollo Quick Diagnosis $(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ) ==="

# 1. Check Apollo status page
echo -e "\n--- Status Page ---"
curl -s https://status.apollo.io/api/v2/status.json 2>/dev/null | \
  python3 -c "import sys,json; d=json.load(sys.stdin); print(f'Status: {d[\"status\"][\"description\"]}')" \
  2>/dev/null || echo "Could not reach status page"

# 2. Test auth
echo -e "\n--- Auth Check ---"
curl -s -w "HTTP %{http_code} in %{time_total}s\n" \
  -H "x-api-key: $APOLLO_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.apollo.io/api/v1/auth/health" | head -1

# 3. Test people search (free endpoint)
echo -e "\n--- People Search ---"
curl -s -w "HTTP %{http_code} in %{time_total}s\n" -o /dev/null \
  -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "x-api-key: $APOLLO_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"q_organization_domains_list":["apollo.io"],"per_page":1}' \
  "https://api.apollo.io/api/v1/mixed_people/api_search"

# 4. Check rate limit headers
echo -e "\n--- Rate Limits ---"
curl -s -D - -o /dev/null \
  -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "x-api-key: $APOLLO_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"q_organization_domains_list":["apollo.io"],"per_page":1}' \
  "https://api.apollo.io/api/v1/mixed_people/api_search" 2>/dev/null | grep -i "x-rate-limit" || echo "No rate limit headers"

# 5. DNS resolution
echo -e "\n--- DNS ---"
dig +short api.apollo.io 2>/dev/null || nslookup api.apollo.io 2>/dev/null || echo "DNS lookup failed"

Step 3: Circuit Breaker

// src/resilience/circuit-breaker.ts
type State = 'closed' | 'open' | 'half-open';

export class CircuitBreaker {
  private state: State = 'closed';
  private failures = 0;
  private lastFailure = 0;
  private halfOpenSuccesses = 0;

  constructor(
    private failureThreshold: number = 5,
    private resetTimeoutMs: number = 60_000,
    private requiredSuccesses: number = 3,
  ) {}

  async execute<T>(fn: () => Promise<T>, fallback?: () => T): Promise<T> {
    if (this.state === 'open') {
      if (Date.now() - this.lastFailure > this.resetTimeoutMs) {
        this.state = 'half-open';
        this.halfOpenSuccesses = 0;
      } else {
        if (fallback) return fallback();
        throw new Error(`Circuit OPEN — Apollo calls blocked for ${Math.round((this.resetTimeoutMs - (Date.now() - this.lastFailure)) / 1000)}s`);
      }
    }

    try {
      const result = await fn();
      if (this.state === 'half-open') {
        this.halfOpenSuccesses++;
        if (this.halfOpenSuccesses >= this.requiredSuccesses) {
          this.state = 'closed';
          this.failures = 0;
        }
      } else {
        this.failures = 0;
      }
      return result;
    } catch (err) {
      this.failures++;
      this.lastFailure = Date.now();
      if (this.failures >= this.failureThreshold) this.state = 'open';
      if (fallback) return fallback();
      throw err;
    }
  }

  get status() { return { state: this.state, failures: this.failures }; }
}

Step 4: Graceful Degradation by Severity

import { CircuitBreaker } from './circuit-breaker';

const breaker = new CircuitBreaker(5, 60_000);

// P1: Total outage — serve cached data
async function handleP1() {
  console.error('[P1] Apollo API unreachable');
  return breaker.execute(
    () => client.post('/mixed_people/api_search', { per_page: 1 }),
    () => {
      console.warn('Serving cached search results');
      return { data: { people: [], source: 'cache', degraded: true } };
    },
  );
}

// P2: Partial failures — reduce load
async function handleP2() {
  console.warn('[P2] Apollo degraded — reducing concurrency');
  // Disable bulk enrichment, reduce search concurrency to 1
  // Continue serving search from cache where possible
}

// P3: Intermittent — retry with backoff
async function handleP3() {
  console.info('[P3] Intermittent errors — backoff enabled');
  // Retry with longer delays, log for monitoring
}

Step 5: Post-Incident Review Template

## Post-Incident Review: Apollo Integration

**Incident ID:** INC-YYYY-MM-DD-NNN
**Severity:** P1 / P2 / P3
**Duration:** HH:MM start to HH:MM resolved (X minutes)
**Apollo Status Page:** Reporting outage? Y/N

### Timeline
| Time (UTC) | Event |
|------------|-------|
| HH:MM | First alert fired (source: Prometheus/PagerDuty) |
| HH:MM | On-call acknowledged |
| HH:MM | Root cause identified |
| HH:MM | Mitigation applied (circuit breaker / cache fallback) |
| HH:MM | Apollo API restored |
| HH:MM | Circuit breaker closed, normal operations resumed |

### Impact
- Searches affected: N requests failed / served from cache
- Enrichments failed: N (credits not consumed)
- Sequences paused: N contacts delayed
- Revenue impact: $X (estimated pipeline delay)

### Root Cause
[Apollo-side outage / rate limiting / key rotation / network issue]

### Action Items
- [ ] Add/improve circuit breaker coverage (owner, due)
- [ ] Increase cache TTL for critical data (owner, due)
- [ ] Add alerting for [specific gap] (owner, due)

Output

• Severity classification matrix (P1-P4) with response times
• Bash diagnostic script (status page, auth, search, rate limits, DNS)
• Circuit breaker with closed/open/half-open states
• Graceful degradation procedures per severity level
• Post-incident review template

Error Handling

Issue	Escalation
P1 > 15 min	Page on-call, open Apollo support ticket
P2 > 2 hours	Notify engineering management
Recurring P3	Promote to P2 tracking issue
Apollo outage	Verify at status.apollo.io, enable cache fallback

Resources

• Apollo Status Page
• Apollo Support
• API Usage Stats

Next Steps

Proceed to apollo-data-handling for data management.