Postmortem (Incident Review)

A postmortem, also called an incident review or retrospective, is a document written after an incident. It describes the impact, the timeline, the contributing causes, what went well, what went badly and a list of follow-up actions with owners and dates.

Why it matters

Outages repeat when lessons live only in people's heads. A good postmortem spreads knowledge, exposes weak points in tooling and process, and gives customers confidence when a version is shared publicly. Its value depends on the follow-up work actually being done.

Example

A common outline:

Summary:      checkout unavailable 09:12-09:38 UTC, 26 minutes
Impact:       about 1,400 failed orders
Root cause:   config change removed a database connection limit
Detection:    uptime monitor alert after 2 min
Action items: add config validation (owner, due date)
              add alert on connection pool saturation

Common mistakes

• Blaming individuals. Focus on conditions and systems.
• Stopping at one cause when several factors combined.
• Action items with no owner or deadline, which never happen.
• Writing it weeks later when memory and logs have faded.

Related

• Root cause analysis
• Blameless culture
• Incident
• गाइड: Incident postmortem template
• टूल: Postmortem generator

यह पेज सामान्य जानकारी है, जिसे हमारी संपादकीय टीम ने लिखा है और दस्तावेज़ीकरण बदलने पर अपडेट किया जाता है। सर्वर और प्रदाता अलग-अलग होते हैं, इसलिए बदलाव पहले सुरक्षित तरीके से जाँचें। देखें: संपादकीय नीति और अस्वीकरण.