<metaproperty="og:title"content="Post-Mortem Template - Spearhead Systems Incident Response Documentation"/>
<metaproperty="og:site_name"content="Spearhead Systems Incident Response Documentation"/>
<metaproperty="og:description"content="A collection of information about the Spearhead Systems incident response process. Not only how to prepare new employees for on-call responsibilities, but also how to handle major incidents, both in preparation and after-work."/>
<metaname="twitter:title"content="Post-Mortem Template - Spearhead Systems Incident Response Documentation"/>
<metaname="twitter:description"content="A collection of information about the Spearhead Systems incident response process. Not only how to prepare new employees for on-call responsibilities, but also how to handle major incidents, both in preparation and after-work."/>
<p>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.</p>
<hr/>
<divclass="admonition note">
<pclass="admonition-title">Guidelines</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<p><strong> Post-Mortem Owner:</strong><em>Your name goes here.</em></p>
<p><strong> Meeting Scheduled For:</strong><em>Schedule the meeting on the "Incident Post-Mortem Meetings" shared calendar, for within 5 business days after the incident. Put the date/time here.</em></p>
<p><strong> Call Recording:</strong><em>Link to the incident call recording.</em></p>
<p><em>Include a <strong>short</strong> 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 SEV-1 due to a runaway process on our primary database machine. This slowness caused roughly 0.024% of alerts that had begun during this time to be delivered out of SLA."</em></p>
<p><em>Include a description of the root cause. 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.</em></p>
<p><em>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 SEV-2/1 ended, (6) links to tools/logs that show how the timestamp was arrived at.</em></p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Time (UTC)</th>
<th>Event</th>
<th>Data Link</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody></tbody>
</table>
<h2id="howd-we-do">How'd We Do?<aclass="headerlink"href="#howd-we-do"title="Permanent link">#</a></h2>
<h3id="what-went-well">What Went Well?<aclass="headerlink"href="#what-went-well"title="Permanent link">#</a></h3>
<ul>
<li><em>List anything you did well and want to call out. It's OK to not list anything.</em></li>
</ul>
<h3id="what-didnt-go-so-well">What Didn't Go So Well?<aclass="headerlink"href="#what-didnt-go-so-well"title="Permanent link">#</a></h3>
<ul>
<li><em>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.</em></li>
<p><em>Each action item should be in the form of a JIRA ticket, and each ticket should have the same set of two tags: “sev1_YYYYMMDD” (such as sev1_20150911) and simply “sev1”. 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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Briefly summarize what happened and where the post-mortem page (this page) can be found.</p>
<p><em>This is what will be included on the status.pagerduty.com website regarding this incident. What are we telling customers, including an apology? (The apology should be genuine, not rote.)</em></p>
