Postmortem

Incident

Priority

p0 / p1 / p2+

Affected services

 Leadup

List the sequence of events that led to the incident.

 Fault

Describe how the change that was implemented didn't work as expected. If available, include relevant data visualizations.

 Impact

Describe how internal and external users were impacted during the incident. Include how many support cases were raised.

 Detection

Report when the team detected the incident and how they knew it was happening. Describe how the team could've improved time to detection.

 Response

Report who responded to the incident and describe what they did at what times. Include any delays or obstacles to responding.

 Recovery

Report how the user impact was mitigated and when the incident was deemed resolved. Describe how the team could've improved time to mitigation.

 Timeline

Detail the incident timeline using UTC to standardize for timezones. Include lead-up events, post-impact event, and any decisions or changes made.

 Five whys root cause identification

Run a 5-whys analysis to understand the true causes of the incident. 

 Blameless root cause

Note the final root cause and describe what needs to change without placing blame to prevent this class of incident from recurring.

 Backlog check

Review the engineering backlog to find out if there was unplanned work that could've prevented the incident or reduced its impact.

 Related incidents

Check if any past incidents could've had the same root cause. Note what mitigation was attempted in those incidents and ask why this incident occurred again.

 Lessons learned

Describe what you learned, what went well, and how you can improve.

 Follow-up tasks

List the Jira issues created to prevent this class of incident in the future. Note who is responsible, when they have to complete the work, and where that work is being tracked.