Using Postmortems to Understand Service Reliability

In 2017, numerous major outages highlighted the importance of conducting postmortems to learn from incidents and improve service stability. While traditional postmortems focus on understanding the root causes and immediate fixes, there is an additional layer of assessing long-term service health that is often overlooked. Effective postmortems should not only capture specific action items but also identify broader trends and potential vulnerabilities to prioritize large-scale improvements. At PagerDuty, engineering teams are encouraged to evaluate and communicate their service's ongoing stability, integrating insights into organizational planning. By addressing both immediate and systemic issues, and ensuring transparency in reporting, organizations can better anticipate and mitigate future incidents, ultimately improving service reliability and reducing the frequency and impact of outages.