Mistral AI Incident Runbook

Overview

Rapid incident response procedures for Mistral AI integration failures. Covers severity classification, quick triage script, decision tree, per-error mitigations, communication templates, and postmortem process.

Severity Levels

Level	Definition	Response Time	Example
P1	Complete outage	< 15 min	All Mistral requests failing
P2	Degraded service	< 1 hour	High latency, partial 429s
P3	Minor impact	< 4 hours	Occasional errors, non-critical feature
P4	No user impact	Next business day	Monitoring gaps, docs

Quick Triage Script

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
echo "=== Mistral AI Quick Triage ==="
echo "Timestamp: $(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ)"

# 1. API health
echo -e "\n1. Mistral API status:"
HTTP=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${MISTRAL_API_KEY}" \
  https://api.mistral.ai/v1/models 2>/dev/null)
echo "   HTTP: $HTTP"
case $HTTP in
  200) echo "   OK — API is reachable" ;;
  401) echo "   AUTH FAILURE — API key invalid or revoked" ;;
  429) echo "   RATE LIMITED — check workspace limits" ;;
  5*) echo "   SERVER ERROR — Mistral service issue" ;;
  000) echo "   NETWORK ERROR — cannot reach api.mistral.ai" ;;
esac

# 2. Our service health
echo -e "\n2. App health endpoint:"
curl -sf https://yourapp.com/health 2>/dev/null | jq '.services.mistral' || echo "   UNREACHABLE"

# 3. Error rate (if Prometheus available)
echo -e "\n3. Error rate (last 5m):"
curl -sf "localhost:9090/api/v1/query?query=rate(mistral_errors_total[5m])" 2>/dev/null \
  | jq -r '.data.result[] | "\(.metric.model): \(.value[1])/s"' || echo "   Prometheus unavailable"

Decision Tree

API returning errors?
|-- YES: curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" https://api.mistral.ai/v1/models
|   |-- 401 → API key issue (Step 1 below)
|   |-- 429 → Rate limited (Step 2 below)
|   |-- 5xx → Mistral service issue (Step 3 below)
|   +-- Timeout → Network issue (Step 4 below)
+-- NO: Our service returning errors?
    |-- YES → Check app logs and config
    +-- NO → Resolved, continue monitoring

Immediate Actions

Step 1: 401 — Authentication Failure (P1)

set -euo pipefail
# Verify key
echo "Key length: ${#MISTRAL_API_KEY}"
echo "Key prefix: ${MISTRAL_API_KEY:0:8}..."

# Test directly
curl -v -H "Authorization: Bearer ${MISTRAL_API_KEY}" \
  https://api.mistral.ai/v1/models

# If invalid: rotate key at console.mistral.ai
# Then update in your secret manager:
# GCP: gcloud secrets versions add mistral-api-key --data-file=-
# AWS: aws secretsmanager put-secret-value --secret-id mistral/api-key
# K8s: kubectl create secret generic mistral --from-literal=api-key="$NEW_KEY" --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -

Step 2: 429 — Rate Limited (P2)

set -euo pipefail
# Check headers for limit info
curl -v -H "Authorization: Bearer ${MISTRAL_API_KEY}" \
  https://api.mistral.ai/v1/models 2>&1 | grep -i "ratelimit\|retry"

# Immediate mitigation: reduce concurrency
kubectl set env deployment/app MAX_CONCURRENT_MISTRAL=3

# Check workspace limits: https://admin.mistral.ai/plateforme/limits
# Long-term: Contact Mistral to increase limits

Step 3: 5xx — Mistral Service Error (P1/P2)

set -euo pipefail
# Check Mistral status page
echo "Check: https://status.mistral.ai/"

# Enable fallback/degradation
kubectl set env deployment/app MISTRAL_FALLBACK=true

# Monitor recovery (check every 30s)
watch -n 30 'curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${MISTRAL_API_KEY}" \
  https://api.mistral.ai/v1/models'

Step 4: Network/Timeout Error (P2)

set -euo pipefail
# Test DNS
nslookup api.mistral.ai

# Test connectivity
curl -v --connect-timeout 5 https://api.mistral.ai/v1/models

# Check egress policies
kubectl get networkpolicy -A | grep mistral

# Increase timeout if latency issue
kubectl set env deployment/app MISTRAL_TIMEOUT_MS=120000

Communication Templates

Internal (Slack)

:red_circle: P[1-4] INCIDENT: Mistral AI Integration
**Status**: INVESTIGATING | MITIGATING | RESOLVED
**Impact**: [Description of user-facing impact]
**Action**: [Current action being taken]
**Next update**: [HH:MM UTC]
**IC**: @[name]

External (Status Page)

AI Feature Degradation

We are experiencing issues with our AI-powered features.
Some users may see slower responses or temporary unavailability.

Our team is investigating with our AI provider.

Affected: [list features]
Workaround: [if any]
Updated: [timestamp UTC]

Post-Incident

Evidence Collection

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
DIR="incident-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)"
mkdir -p "$DIR"

kubectl logs -l app=mistral-service --since=2h > "$DIR/app-logs.txt" 2>/dev/null || true
kubectl get events --sort-by=.lastTimestamp > "$DIR/k8s-events.txt" 2>/dev/null || true
kubectl get deployment mistral-service -o yaml | grep -v api-key > "$DIR/deployment.yaml" 2>/dev/null || true

tar -czf "$DIR.tar.gz" "$DIR" && rm -rf "$DIR"
echo "Evidence: $DIR.tar.gz"

Postmortem Template

## Incident: Mistral AI [Error Type]
**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD  |  **Duration:** Xh Ym  |  **Severity:** P[1-4]

### Summary
[1-2 sentence description]

### Timeline (UTC)
| Time | Event |
|------|-------|
| HH:MM | Alert fired |
| HH:MM | IC assigned |
| HH:MM | Root cause identified |
| HH:MM | Mitigated |
| HH:MM | Resolved |

### Root Cause
[Technical explanation]

### Impact
- Users affected: [N]
- Failed requests: [N]
- Duration: [time]

### Action Items
| Priority | Action | Owner | Due |
|----------|--------|-------|-----|
| P1 | [Fix] | @name | date |
| P2 | [Prevent] | @name | date |

Error Handling

Issue	Cause	Solution
kubectl auth expired	Token expired	Re-authenticate with cloud provider
Metrics unavailable	Prometheus down	Fall back to app logs
Secret rotation fails	IAM permissions	Escalate to admin
Fallback not working	Not implemented	Return cached responses or error page

Resources

• Mistral AI Status
• Mistral Console
• Discord Community

Output

• Issue identified and severity classified
• Mitigation applied per error type
• Stakeholders notified with status updates
• Evidence collected for postmortem
• Action items documented