Knowledge MaxxingPost-incident review
A post-incident review is a structured examination of what happened during an incident, why it happened, and what changes could prevent or reduce it happening again.
Prerequisite: Incident
What matters
Focusing the review on systemic causes rather than individual blame is what makes the process actually produce lasting fixes, rather than just assigning fault and moving on.
Example
A post-incident review for an outage might reveal a missing alert threshold was the real root cause, leading the team to add that specific monitoring gap.
Common misconception
A post-incident review is not primarily about identifying who to blame; the goal is finding systemic causes and fixes, not assigning fault to one person.
Recall question
Why does focusing a review on systemic causes work better than assigning individual blame?