Post-Mortem (Incident Review)
A blameless analysis conducted after an incident to understand causes and prevent recurrence.
A post-mortem (also called an incident review or retrospective) is a structured analysis conducted after a significant incident or outage. The goal is to understand what happened, why it happened, and what changes will prevent it from happening again. Good post-mortems are blameless — they focus on systemic causes rather than individual errors. Post-mortems should produce concrete action items with owners and deadlines.
Related Terms
The process of identifying, responding to, and resolving IT incidents to restore normal service.
The average time it takes to recover a system or service after a failure.
A rotation where engineers are available outside normal hours to respond to incidents.