Structured Blameless Postmortems & Root Cause Analysis

Learning from failure is a core tenet of SRE.

Blameless Culture

A postmortem should assume that everyone involved in an incident had good intentions and did the right thing with the information they had. You cannot fix people; you can only fix systems.

The Postmortem Document

Must include:

• Incident Summary
• Timeline
• Root Cause(s)
• Resolution and Recovery
• Action Items (Preventative measures)

Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

Using the “5 Whys” technique to drill down beyond surface-level symptoms to underlying systemic failures.