Getting the Most from Your Incident Post-Mortem

Incident post-mortems are crucial tools for understanding and improving response processes following significant incidents, as they document the event, analyze root causes, evaluate response effectiveness, and recommend improvements without assigning blame. These post-mortems should include a comprehensive record of the incident and its impacts, a root cause analysis, and suggestions for future prevention and mitigation, while avoiding personnel-related issues. Not all incidents necessitate a post-mortem; they are primarily reserved for events involving data loss, significant disruptions, or unresolved root causes. The document emphasizes that post-mortems should be seen as opportunities for learning and enhancement rather than sources of embarrassment. PagerDuty offers resources like a free post-mortem handbook and a platform for automating and facilitating the post-mortem process to help organizations improve their incident management strategies.