Note record

Post Mortems

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TL;DR - A Post Mortem is a reflection / review of an incident to better understand what happened, the scenario that allowed it to happen, and how to prevent it from recurring.

Overview

Post Mortems are a useful practice of reflection for understanding how an incident occurred and coming up with next steps to prevent its recurrence.

Properties of a good Post Mortem

  • Overview - A TL;DR of what happened
  • Impact - Data on impact to customers and company
  • Root Cause - What caused the incident
  • Timeline showing what happened, why it happened, and when it happened
  • Details and followups for each incident phase

Incident phases (largely pulled from Meta's post mortem process):

  • Detection - Knowing smth bad is happening
  • Escalation - Escalating to the appropriate parties to solve it
  • Mitigation - Stopping the bleeding
  • Remediation - Fixing the wound - anything that got hurt from this
  • Prevention - Preventing this class of error from happening again

Todos

  • Potentially a Post Mortem template?
  • Useful frames like chain of events and 5 whys?

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