Describe your systems, cadence, and escalation rules. Makeform creates a recurring IT operations checklist with evidence, routing, ownership, and a log.
Route completed checks to Slack, Google Sheets, and Zapier.
Sample prompts for your operations runbook
Choose a prompt, tailor it, or send it to the builder. The shown structure is an example.
Audience
Service desk and infrastructure staff starting a shift
Format
Short daily checklist with exception routing
Prompt size
357 chars
Example checklist structure
Short daily checklist with exception routing
Technician, date, and shift
Overnight backups completed as expected?
Monitoring alerts reviewed
Affected system and evidence link
Handoff summary and acknowledgment
Suggested routing tags
Completed
Needs follow-up
Escalated
Ask for the backup job, last successful run, and restore-test date so the next shift knows what was verified.
Step 1
Assign
send the right cadence to the on-duty owner
Step 2
Verify
record status, readings, links, and evidence
Step 3
Escalate
route exceptions with impact and next action
Step 4
Review
use the dated log for trends and handoffs
Operational clarity
Structured answers show what staff verified and give the next technician usable context.
Pair status with a dashboard link, timestamp, reading, screenshot, or ticket.
Failed checks reveal fields for service, impact, action, owner, and target date.
Carry open alerts, changes, and vendor cases forward with a next step.
Match the cadence
Use focused daily forms and deeper weekly or monthly reviews.
Backup failures, service health, capacity alerts, security notifications, scheduled jobs, and the priority ticket queue.
Patch status, pending restarts, certificate warnings, database growth, hardware health, and a sampled restore test.
Privileged accounts, inactive users, service accounts, access exceptions, and unresolved offboarding work.
Recovery contacts, runbooks, vendor paths, asset lifecycle dates, monitoring coverage, and recurring incident themes.
Checklist workflow
Start with the systems and checks your team already owns, then make responsibility, evidence, exceptions, and follow-up explicit.
Name the services, owner, due time, thresholds, and source dashboards.
Add actual jobs, monitoring groups, certificate windows, queues, and contacts.
Share the form and automate reminders or notifications for your cadence.
Filter attention-needed results and carry actions into the next review.
Choose the record
The runbook explains procedures; the checklist records completed work, observations, and unowned issues.
Field guide
These six groups cover routine work, evidence, and exception actions.
Assignment
Capture the operator, date, shift, environment, and handoff source for each operating window.
Monitoring
Capture the state shown in agreed dashboards and queues, with readings or links for context.
Backup & recovery
Track backup job failures and sampled restore exercises as separate checks.
Changes & maintenance
Capture active changes, maintenance, patches, restarts, certificates, vendor work, and recovery references.
Exceptions
Require enough exception context for another person to continue the work.
Closeout
Summarize overall health, unresolved work, pending updates, and the next review.
Related IT tools
Pair the checklist with focused request, incident, change, access, asset, and maintenance forms.
Capture affected users, device or service, symptoms, urgency, and troubleshooting details for follow-up work.
Open toolDocument the reason, scope, schedule, dependencies, test plan, and recovery steps for planned changes.
Open toolRecord containment, recovery actions, remaining tasks, evidence references, and closure review details.
Open toolCollect requested privileges, business need, target systems, approver, duration, and review date.
Open toolKeep device identity, assigned owner, location, warranty, lifecycle, and status information structured.
Open toolLog inspections, faults, repairs, parts, technician notes, and the next scheduled maintenance date.
Open toolFAQ
Practical answers for IT managers replacing informal checks and scattered shift notes.
An IT operations checklist records recurring checks such as backups, monitoring alerts, capacity, patches, certificates, ticket queues, access reviews, and handoffs. Each submission gives managers a dated activity log and an exception list.
Daily checks often cover jobs, alerts, service health, capacity, tickets, and handoffs. Weekly work may cover patches, restarts, restore samples, growth, hardware, and certificates. Monthly reviews can cover access, assets, licenses, lifecycle, recovery contacts, monitoring gaps, and runbooks. Adapt the cadence to each system.
Ask for the source and observation, not only a checkbox. Useful fields include dashboard URL, job and last run, reading, alert timestamp, screenshot, ticket, restore-test record, or change reference.
Yes. Keep Pass quick, while Attention needed opens fields for system, impact, evidence, action, priority, owner, due date, ticket, and escalation contact. Allow Not applicable with a reason.
Yes. Build versions for service desk, network, cloud, application, database, site, or after-hours teams. An environment selector can show only relevant tasks while shared status and exception fields keep reporting consistent.
Capture both technicians, active alerts, incidents, changes, maintenance, workarounds, vendor cases, and next actions. Route the submission to the incoming shift for acknowledgment, while open tasks retain an owner and deadline.
Yes. Makeform provides unlimited free forms and responses, so you can generate, edit, publish, and collect recurring checklist submissions without a form or response cap. The paid tier removes the Makeform badge.
Submissions arrive in the Makeform inbox and can go to Google Sheets, Slack, or Zapier workflows. Filter by status and owner to notify staff, maintain a review log, and carry unresolved actions forward.
Make routine checks useful after the shift ends.
