Go-Live checklist

📅 Updated: August 24, 2025 · ⏱ Estimated duration: 5 min · 🏷 Category: Templates

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📘 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.

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✅ 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).

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📊 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.

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👥 Access and Permissions

• Review roles and access to critical environments (production, databases, storage).
• Remove temporary test accounts.
• Apply the principle of least privilege.

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🔄 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.

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🛡 Best Practices

1. Never go live without verified backups.
2. Test real-time monitoring before Go-Live.
3. Permissions reviewed and documented by the security team.
4. Rollback tested in staging environments.
5. Clear communication of the contingency plan across all teams.

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✅ Quick Checklist

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📊 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.

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📚 Additional Resources

• Microsoft Azure – Best practices before Go-Live
• Google SRE – Release and Rollback
• DevOps Pre-Production Checklist

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💡 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.