Postmortem basics

Topic: Monitoring basics

Write a postmortem after significant incidents. Include timeline, root cause, impact, and actions. Blameless culture. Use when you need to learn from outages and prevent recurrence.

Intent: How-to

Quick answer

  • Sections: summary, impact, timeline, root cause, what went well, what to improve, action items with owners.
  • Blameless. Focus on systems and process. Assign action items and due dates. Publish and discuss with team.
  • Follow up on action items. Link postmortem from runbook or alert. Reuse for training.

Prerequisites

Steps

  1. Draft

    Summary, impact, timeline, root cause. What went well and what to improve. Action items with owners.

  2. Review and publish

    Blameless review. Publish. Discuss in team meeting. Link from runbook.

  3. Follow up

    Track action items. Close when done. Revisit if similar incident recurs.

Summary

Write blameless postmortem with timeline, root cause, and action items. Publish and follow up.

Prerequisites

Steps

Step 1: Draft

Summary, impact, timeline, root cause, actions with owners.

Step 2: Review and publish

Blameless review; publish; discuss; link from runbook.

Step 3: Follow up

Track and close action items; revisit if incident recurs.

Verification

  • Postmortem published; actions tracked; runbook updated.

Troubleshooting

No root cause — Document knowns and unknowns; still add actions. Blame — Reframe as process and systems.

Next steps

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