Glossary · Reliability & operations
Postmortem
A durable incident record that explains impact, detection, response, contributing conditions, recovery, and owned follow-up actions without assigning blame as a substitute for analysis.
Why it matters
A resolved outage still has value as evidence. Capturing system conditions and decisions turns one event into improvements that reduce recurrence and response time.
In practice
Build the timeline from traces and logs, distinguish triggering events from contributing conditions, assign dated actions, and review whether each action changed the relevant control.
Common confusion
A postmortem is not a meeting transcript or a search for one person's mistake. It should produce testable system improvements.
Related terms
Sources
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