Postmortem Report

What is it

A postmortem (or post-mortem) is a process intended to help you learn from past incidents. It typically involves an analysis or discussion soon after an event has taken place.

What is the purpose of a postmortem report?

As your systems scale and become more complex, failure is inevitable

, assessment and remediation is more involved and time-consuming, and it becomes increasingly painful to repeat recurring mistakes. Not having data when you need it is expensive.

The good news is, most organizations do have some kind of a postmortem process in place to assess what happened once a service has been restored. Arguably, any resolution of an issue isn’t truly complete until a team has fully documented and reflected on it.

However, conducting a postmortem can be a highly time-consuming task — teams often spend hours on each postmortem trying to piece together the chronology of events from different sources of information.

Streamlining the postmortem process is key to helping your team get the most from their postmortem time investment: spending less time conducting the postmortem, while extracting more effective learnings, is a faster path to increased operational maturity. In fact, the true value of postmortems comes from helping institutionalize a positive culture around frequent and iterative improvement.

What is the purpose of a postmortem report?

What is a postmortem? A postmortem is a process where a team reflects on a problem — for example, an unexpected loss of redundancy, or perhaps a failed software deployment — and documents what the problem was and how to avoid it in the future

Example

This was made for a Wordpress server using the LAMP stack, you can find more details here