DevOps&SRE Library

Having a dedicated incident post-mortem is just as important as having a robust incident response plan. The post-mortem is key to understanding exactly what went wrong, why it happened in the first place, and what you can do to avoid it in the future.

It’s an essential document but many organizations either haphazardly put together post-incident notes that live in disparate places or don’t know where to start in creating their own post-mortems. To help, we’re sharing the incident post-mortem template that we use internally.

This template outlines our “sensible default” for documenting any incident, technical or otherwise. We believe it strikes a healthy balance between raw data, human interpretation, and concrete actions. And we say “sensible default” because it’s rare that this will perfectly cover the specific needs of your organization, and that’s fine. Think of this as a launching off point for your own incident post-mortem document.

Within each section, we’ve outlined the background on what it’s for, why it’s important, and how we advise you to complete it.

Logging information in a structured format for better analysis and processing of log data

Observability has become a bit of a buzzword in the industry for the last few years. Exactly what "observability" means depends on who you ask, but most people would agree its about both:

- Being able to observe customer experience and behavior

- Being able to observe and understand what's happening within our technology solutions

There's plenty of content out there telling you how to implement observability, or what good looks like. But what about bad observability? What are some anti-patterns to watch out for?