DevOps Foundations: Effective Postmortems

Learn how to conduct a formal, blameless incident postmortem in a way that leverages up-to-date learning in safety and cognitive science.

Introduction

• Learning through postmortems
• What to expect from this course

1. About Postmortems

• Why postmortems?
• Resilience engineering
• Blamelessness
• Root cause is a myth

2. Postmortem Preparation

• Incident descriptions
• Incident timelines
• Incident metrics
• Challenge: Your incident write-up
• Solution: Your incident description
• Solution: Your incident timeline

3. Postmortem Analysis

• Controlling cognitive bias
• What went well
• Contributing factors
• Challenge: Your contributing factors
• Solution: Your contributing factors
• Corrective actions
• Challenge: Your corrective actions
• Solution: Your corrective actions
• Facilitating the postmortem meeting
• Leading a group postmortem analysis

4. After the Postmortem

• Transparent uptime
• Retrospectives and near misses

Conclusion

• Next steps