How-To Guides
Manage Approvals And Break-Glass
Operate approval queues and emergency overrides without weakening governance discipline.
High-Risk Area
Approval decisions and break-glass usage directly affect production safety and audit reliability. Treat this workflow as controlled operations.
When To Use This Guide
- Reviewing pending production-impacting requests.
- Defining approver behavior for new teams.
- Responding to incidents where temporary emergency access is required.
Prerequisites
- Approver eligibility model is already configured.
- Team understands requester vs approver separation rules.
- Incident commander ownership is defined for emergency overrides.
UI Route Map
- Open
Policy and Approvals. - Filter pending requests by project/environment/action risk.
- Review decision detail before approve/reject.
- Use break-glass controls only when incident criteria are met.
Approval Execution Flow
Open request and review action summary, scope, and risk context.
Confirm gate progress and approver eligibility indicators.
Validate requester identity and self-approval restrictions.
Approve or reject with explicit reasoning comment.
Track request to final execution state and capture outcome evidence.
Break-Glass Execution Flow
Verify incident condition requires temporary override.
Create time-bound break-glass session with explicit reason and narrow scope.
Execute only emergency actions needed for containment or recovery.
Close session immediately after emergency action completes.
Review timeline and create preventive action to avoid repeat emergency path.
Decision Guide
- Scope is clear, gates are satisfied, and risk is acceptable.
- Release/rollback context is complete and verifiable.
- Scope is unclear, evidence is missing, or policy intent is violated.
- Use rejection comments that explain exact remediation path.
- Only for active incidents or severe production blockage.
- Must be short-lived, reasoned, and fully auditable.
- Routine operations, policy shortcuts, or convenience scenarios.
- Missing incident context or undefined closure owner.
Validation Checklist
- Self-approval restriction is active where required.
- Approval comments are clear and action-oriented.
- Break-glass sessions are short, scoped, and documented.
- Emergency actions are linked to incident closure evidence.
Common Failure Modes
- Duplicate review attempts on already processed requests.
- Approver mismatch due to recent team membership changes.
- Break-glass left active longer than needed.
- Rejected request without enough remediation guidance.
Decision Comment Templates
Approval comment template:
Decision:
Reason:
Risk acknowledged:
Required follow-up:
Break-glass closure template:
Incident reference:
Reason used:
Actions performed:
Session closed at:
Preventive action owner: