Lokalise Incident Runbook

Overview

Rapid incident response procedures for Lokalise-related outages and issues.

Prerequisites

• Access to Lokalise dashboard and status page
• Application logs and monitoring dashboards
• Communication channels (Slack, PagerDuty)
• Rollback procedures documented

Severity Levels

Level	Definition	Response Time	Examples
P1	Complete outage	< 15 min	Lokalise API unreachable, all translations missing
P2	Degraded service	< 1 hour	High latency, partial failures, key languages affected
P3	Minor impact	< 4 hours	Webhook delays, non-critical translations missing
P4	No user impact	Next business day	Monitoring gaps, sync delays

Quick Triage Commands

# 1. Check Lokalise API status
curl -s https://api.lokalise.com/api2/system/health | jq

# 2. Check Lokalise status page
curl -s https://status.lokalise.com/api/v2/status.json | jq '.status.description'

# 3. Test API authentication
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \
  -H "X-Api-Token: $LOKALISE_API_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.lokalise.com/api2/projects?limit=1"

# 4. Check your app's translation health
curl -s https://your-app.com/health/lokalise | jq

# 5. Check recent error logs (last 5 min)
grep -i "lokalise" /var/log/app/*.log | tail -50

Decision Tree

Translations missing/broken?
├─ YES: Is https://status.lokalise.com showing incident?
│   ├─ YES → Enable fallback translations. Monitor status page.
│   └─ NO → Check our integration. Continue triage below.
└─ NO: Is sync failing?
    ├─ YES → Check CI/CD pipeline, API token validity
    └─ NO → Likely localized issue. Check specific component.

API returning errors?
├─ 401 → Token expired/invalid. Rotate token.
├─ 403 → Permission denied. Check project access.
├─ 404 → Project/key not found. Verify IDs.
├─ 429 → Rate limited. Enable backoff/queuing.
└─ 5xx → Lokalise issue. Enable fallback, monitor status.

Immediate Actions by Error Type

401/403 - Authentication/Authorization

# Verify token is set
echo "Token set: ${LOKALISE_API_TOKEN:+YES}"

# Test token validity
curl -s -H "X-Api-Token: $LOKALISE_API_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.lokalise.com/api2/projects?limit=1" | jq '.projects[0].name // .error'

# If token is invalid:
# 1. Generate new token in Lokalise Profile Settings
# 2. Update in secret manager
# 3. Restart affected services

429 - Rate Limited

# Check current rate limit status
curl -s -I -H "X-Api-Token: $LOKALISE_API_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.lokalise.com/api2/projects" | grep -i "x-ratelimit"

# Immediate mitigation:
# 1. Reduce concurrent requests
# 2. Add delays between API calls
# 3. Enable request queuing

# Application config
export LOKALISE_RATE_LIMIT_MODE=queue
export LOKALISE_REQUEST_DELAY_MS=200

5xx - Lokalise Server Errors

# Check Lokalise status
curl -s https://status.lokalise.com/api/v2/status.json | jq

# Enable graceful degradation
export LOKALISE_FALLBACK_ENABLED=true

# Use bundled translations as fallback
# Your app should fall back to static locale files

# Monitor for resolution
watch -n 60 'curl -s https://status.lokalise.com/api/v2/status.json | jq ".status.description"'

Missing Translations

# Check if translations exist in Lokalise
lokalise2 --token "$LOKALISE_API_TOKEN" \
  --project-id "$LOKALISE_PROJECT_ID" \
  key list --filter-untranslated-any 1 | head -20

# Check local translation files
ls -la src/locales/
cat src/locales/en.json | jq 'keys | length'

# If files missing, re-download
npm run i18n:pull

Communication Templates

Internal (Slack)

:red_circle: P1 INCIDENT: Lokalise Integration
Status: INVESTIGATING
Impact: [Translations not loading for all users]
Current action: [Checking API status and enabling fallback]
Next update: [Time + 15 min]
Incident commander: @[name]

External (Status Page)

Translation Service Issue

We're experiencing issues with our translation service.
Some users may see English text instead of their preferred language.

We're actively investigating and will provide updates.

Last updated: [timestamp]

Post-Incident

Evidence Collection

# Generate debug bundle
bash scripts/lokalise-debug-bundle.sh

# Export relevant logs
grep -i "lokalise" /var/log/app/*.log > incident-logs.txt

# Export metrics snapshot
curl "http://prometheus:9090/api/v1/query_range?query=lokalise_errors_total&start=-2h" > metrics.json

# Screenshot dashboards
# Document timeline in incident channel

Postmortem Template

## Incident: Lokalise [Error Type]
**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD
**Duration:** X hours Y minutes
**Severity:** P[1-4]
**Incident Commander:** [Name]

### Summary
[1-2 sentence description of what happened]

### Timeline (all times UTC)
- HH:MM - [Alert triggered / Issue reported]
- HH:MM - [Investigation started]
- HH:MM - [Root cause identified]
- HH:MM - [Mitigation applied]
- HH:MM - [Service restored]

### Root Cause
[Technical explanation of what went wrong]

### Impact
- Users affected: [N]
- Duration of user impact: [X minutes]
- Translations affected: [Languages/keys]

### What Went Well
- [Positive aspects of response]

### What Could Be Improved
- [Areas for improvement]

### Action Items
- [ ] [Preventive measure] - Owner - Due date
- [ ] [Documentation update] - Owner - Due date
- [ ] [Monitoring improvement] - Owner - Due date

Rollback Procedures

Revert to Bundled Translations

# If translations are corrupted, revert to last known good
git checkout HEAD~1 -- src/locales/

# Rebuild and deploy
npm run build
npm run deploy

# Disable auto-sync temporarily
export LOKALISE_AUTO_SYNC=false

Re-download from Lokalise

# Download reviewed translations only
lokalise2 --token "$LOKALISE_API_TOKEN" \
  --project-id "$LOKALISE_PROJECT_ID" \
  file download \
  --format json \
  --filter-data reviewed \
  --unzip-to ./src/locales

Output

• Issue identified and categorized
• Remediation applied
• Stakeholders notified
• Evidence collected for postmortem

Error Handling

Issue	Cause	Solution
Can't reach status page	Network issue	Use mobile or VPN
Logs unavailable	Logging down	Check logging service
Fallback not working	Not configured	Enable static fallback
Token rotation fails	Permission denied	Escalate to admin

Examples

One-Line Health Check

curl -sf https://your-app.com/health/lokalise | jq '.status' || echo "UNHEALTHY"

Quick Fallback Enable

// Emergency fallback - use in incident
process.env.LOKALISE_FALLBACK_ENABLED = "true";

// Your translation loader should check this
const useFallback = process.env.LOKALISE_FALLBACK_ENABLED === "true";
if (useFallback) {
  return loadBundledTranslations(locale);
}

Resources

• Lokalise Status Page
• Lokalise Support
• Community Forum

Next Steps

For data handling, see lokalise-data-handling.