Postmortem
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A Postmortem is the meeting you have after an incident to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. In a blameless postmortem, you focus on the system and process failures, not the people. The output is a list of action items to improve things.
Real Talk
A postmortem (also called post-incident review) is a structured analysis conducted after an incident to identify root causes, contributing factors, and remediation actions. Blameless postmortems (popularized by Google SRE) focus on systemic issues rather than individual blame to encourage honest reporting.
When You'll Hear This
"Write the postmortem document by end of day Friday." / "The postmortem showed three systemic issues that led to the outage."
Related Terms
Chaos Engineering
Imagine stress-testing a bridge by parking trucks on it before opening day instead of hoping it holds.
Incident
An incident is when something has gone wrong in production and users are affected.
Incident Response
Incident Response is the process your team follows when production breaks. Who gets paged? Who's the incident commander?
Runbook
A Runbook is a step-by-step guide for handling a specific operational task or incident.
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)
SRE is Google's version of DevOps with a more engineering-focused twist.