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Cloud Computing & DevOps vocabulary · Reliability and Incidents

Postmortem

Meaning in cloud computing & devops, with examples

/ˌpoʊstˈmɔːrtəm/nounCore term

In cloud computing & devops, postmortem means: A written review after an incident that explains what happened, the impact, the timeline, the root cause and the actions that will stop it happening again.

In Turkish: olay sonrası analiz, olay sonrası değerlendirme, postmortem

How it is used

Good teams write 'blameless postmortems' that focus on systems and processes, not on who made a mistake. Also called a post-incident review or incident report. Ends with action items that have owners.

Example sentences

  1. The postmortem found that the alert existed but went to a channel nobody watched.

  2. Please write the postmortem by Friday and add an owner to each action item.

Common collocations

  • blameless postmortem
  • write a postmortem
  • postmortem review
  • action items
  • incidentAn unplanned event that disrupts a service or makes it worse for users, such as an outage, a big slowdown or a data problem, and that needs a quick response.
  • root causeThe deepest, original reason a problem happened, which, if fixed, stops the same problem from coming back, as opposed to its visible symptoms.
  • outageA period when a service, system or part of it is not working or cannot be reached by users.
  • on-callAvailable outside normal hours to respond quickly if an alert or incident happens. Engineers take turns being on call for their services.
  • runbookA written step-by-step guide for handling a specific task or alert, such as restarting a service or clearing a full disk, so anyone on call can follow it.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Reliability and Incidents

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