Critical steps before going live.
📅 Updated: August 24, 2025 · ⏱ Estimated duration: 5 min · 🏷 Category: Templates
📘 Introduction
Go-Live marks the transition of a system from testing environments into production.
This checklist serves as a minimum guide to reduce risks, ensure business continuity, and prepare recovery mechanisms in case of incidents.
✅ Verifications
🔒 Backups
- Confirm the existence of complete and recent backups.
- Verify that backups are recoverable through restore tests.
- Define clear retention policies (minimum 30 days).
📊 Monitoring
- Configure proactive alerts (CPU, memory, disk, logs).
- Integrate with observability tools (App Insights, Log Analytics, Grafana, etc.).
- Set up dashboards for the operations team.
👥 Access and Permissions
- Review roles and access to critical environments (production, databases, storage).
- Remove temporary test accounts.
- Apply the principle of least privilege.
🔄 Rollback Plan
- Document a rollback plan in case of failure.
- Define clear criteria:
- When to trigger rollback.
- Who executes it.
- Validate that rollback procedures are tested and automated.
🛡 Best Practices
- Never go live without verified backups.
- Test real-time monitoring before Go-Live.
- Permissions reviewed and documented by the security team.
- Rollback tested in staging environments.
- Clear communication of the contingency plan across all teams.
✅ Quick Checklist
| Area | Key Actions | Status |
|---|
| Backups | Validate existence and restore of backups. | ⬜ |
| Monitoring | Alerts and dashboards configured. | ⬜ |
| Access | Permissions reviewed and temp accounts removed. | ⬜ |
| Rollback | Plan documented, tested, and owners assigned. | ⬜ |
📊 Success Metrics
- Backup recovery success rate > 95%.
- Incident detection time < 5 minutes thanks to alerts.
- Least privilege access compliance validated by audit.
- Rollback execution successful in tests before Go-Live.
📚 Additional Resources
💡 Final recommendation: use this checklist as a reusable template, adapting it to each project and keeping it updated based on lessons learned from previous deployments.