Post-Mortem Template
This is a standard template we use for post-mortems at PagerDuty. Each section describes the type of information you will want to put in that section.
Guidelines
This page is intended to be reviewed during a post-mortem meeting that should be scheduled within 5 business days of any event. Your first step should be to schedule the post-mortem meeting in the shared calendar for within 5 business days after the incident. Don't wait until you've filled in the info to schedule the meeting, however make sure the page is completed by the meeting.
Post-Mortem Owner: Your name goes here.
Meeting Scheduled For: Schedule the meeting on the "Incident Post-Mortem Meetings" shared calendar, for within 5 business days after the incident. Put the date/time here.
Overview#
Include a short sentence or two summarizing the root cause, timeline summary, and the impact. E.g. "On the morning of August 99th, we suffered a 1 minute P0 due to a runaway process on our primary database machine. This caused 11% of requests to the homefeed to return a 500 error."
What Happened#
Include a short description of what happened.
Contributing Causes#
Include a description of any conditions that contributed to the issue. If there were any actions taken that exacerbated the issue, also include them here with the intention of learning from any mistakes made during the resolution process.
Resolution#
Include a description what solved the problem. If there was a temporary fix in place, describe that along with the long-term solution.
Impact#
Be very specific here, include exact numbers.
Responders#
- Who was the IC?
- Who else was involved?
Timeline#
Some important times to include: (1) time the root cause began, (2) time of the page, (3) time that the status page was updated (i.e. when the incident became public), (4) time of any significant actions, (5) time the P1/0 ended, (6) links to tools/logs that show how the timestamp was arrived at.
| Time (UTC) | Event | Data Link |
|---|---|---|
How'd We Do?#
What Went Well?#
- List anything you did well and want to call out.
What Didn't Go So Well?#
- List anything you think we didn't do very well. The intent is that we should follow up on all points here to improve our processes.
Action Items#
Each action item should be in the form of a JIRA ticket, and each ticket should have the same set of two tags: “postmortem_YYYYMMDD” (such as postmortem_20150911) and simply “postmortem”. Include action items such as: (1) any fixes required to prevent the root cause in the future, (2) any preparedness tasks that could help mitigate the problem if it came up again, (3) remaining post-mortem steps, such as the internal email, as well as the status-page public post, (4) any improvements to our incident response process.
Messaging#
Internal Slack (#On-Call)#
This is a follow-up for employees. It should be sent out right after the post-mortem meeting is over. It only needs a short paragraph summarizing the incident and a link to this wiki page.
Briefly summarize what happened and where the post-mortem page (this page) can be found.