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Top 5 Best Practices for Conducting Post-Incident Reviews to Improve Service Reliability

In 1697, playwright William Congreve penned, “Hell hath no fury like a user who can’t access the website they want” (or something like that).

We’ll never know how Congreve knew about the importance of maintaining 99.9% uptime before we harnessed the power of electricity, but what we do know is that the best way to handle the inevitability of a website incident is to conduct a post-incident review.

Not sure where to start? We’re here to help with some tips and tricks to help SRE and DevOps teams conduct thoughtful, insightful post-incident reviews that drive systematic change.

1. Use and Encourage Blameless Reporting

It’s easy to fall into the trap of hyper-focusing on the “who” of an incident instead of the “why,” but that’s not a productive or solution-oriented approach. Instead, your priority should be getting to the bottom of the issues and conditions that led to the incident rather than assigning fault to individuals.

This method of collaboration has two key benefits:

First, it helps mitigate the panic that naturally comes with an incident, allowing your team to focus on deploying fixes instead of panicking about what part they might have played in the situation.

Second, it encourages open communication and honest reporting, which means that the actual cause of issues comes to the surface much sooner. This leads to more accurate problem identification and faster resolution to minimize repeat incidents.

Questions that facilitate constructive, blameless discussions can include:

• What were the contributing factors to this incident?
• How can we improve our processes to avoid this in the future?
• What obstacles did the team encounter during the incident response?

2. Bring the Right People Together to Create a Detailed Timeline of the Incident

You’ll want to approach your post-incident reporting with perspectives from all of the relevant stakeholders — SREs who worked on the problem, incident managers, support staff, user-submitted tickets, etc. — as they’ll help fill in the gaps about what happened and start planning how to resolve it.

Once everyone’s gathered, give everyone a turn to reconstruct the incident timeline with information such as:

• When was the incident first reported, and how was it detected?
• What steps were taken to escalate the issue, including the times and personnel involved?
• What actions were used to mitigate or resolve the incident — code changes, server restarts, communication logs, etc.?
• When was the issue resolved?

You’ll also want to gather the highest-quality information. The more detailed and specific, the better. Ensure your timestamps are accurate to the minute and that every action is noted, even if it seems minor.

3. Dig Into the Metrics to Identify Trends and Set Goals

In the aftermath of an incident, data is your best friend. The more detailed your logs are, the better you can construct a sequence of events and track metrics to reveal performance issues.

First things first: If you don’t have a reliable constant performance monitoring platform, it’s time to get one.

Comprehensive platforms like Uptime.com are the best way to keep a log of longitudinal data for anomaly detection and performance benchmarking, turning raw data into preventative action. You can choose from dozens of easy-to-use, sophisticated checks that monitor everything related to the performance, health, and downtime of your websites, applications, and services.

Next, you’ll analyze your data to identify patterns or trends you might not have noticed previously. Are there specific times when your system tends to slow down? Do certain deployments consistently trigger issues?

Use these metrics to optimize your operations and scale your infrastructure accordingly.

4. Identify Root Causes, Not Symptoms

When you go to the doctor with a stomachache, would you prefer that they give you a dose of anti-nausea medicine or run some tests to determine the cause of your symptoms? If you want the best long-term outcome, the obvious answer is running tests because it’s the only way to address the root of the problem head-on.

You should apply this same concept to your post-incident reporting process. Dig deeper and identify the heart of the issue rather than slapping a bandage on a broken arm.

While you could manually complete this process using tools like cause-and-effect diagrams and questioning techniques, a comprehensive site performance monitoring tool with alerting services eliminates the manual labor involved in determining what went wrong.

Not only do you get real-time downtime and performance alerts that integrate with your favorite devices and software tools, but you’ll also have insights that help you quickly diagnose what went wrong.

5. Use Today’s Lessons to Mitigate Tomorrow’s Incidents

While it can be difficult to see the bright side of a bad situation, post-incident reviews are an opportunity to turn a crisis into a learning experience that drives meaningful change.

Once you’ve put out the immediate fire, use the information to create a concrete action plan that identifies specific changes and who is responsible for making them. These actions will be very specific to the issue you are dealing with, but in general, they might include:

• Standardizing and documenting deployment procedures to minimize human error
• Creating detailed runbooks and troubleshooting guides to speed up incident resolution
• Adopting new tools to address monitoring gaps that allow issues to go unnoticed

Once you’ve assigned out these actions and set deadlines for their completion, you’re on the right track to strengthening your system’s overall resilience and reducing incident rates in the long term.

Improve Your Post-Incident Reporting Process With Uptime.com

Uptime.com’s minute-to-minute monitoring solutions equip SRE and DevOps teams with the tools to keep their systems running smoothly. And, with our new UPro! Professional Services, you can streamline onboarding with in-depth training, tailored configurations for precise and effective monitoring, and access to our Custom Alert Runbook, which defines precise actions and procedures for swift response to detected issues.

Don’t let the next incident happen without industry-leading resources to turn your post-incident report into an action plan. Get started with a free 14-day trial or book a demo today!

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