Reading about postmortem best practices can sometimes be quite different from seeing them in action. Postmortems are like snowflakes; no two will ever look the same. There isn’t a definitive template for success that will work in every situation, but there are some practices and procedures when writing postmortems that can help. Here are five practices that can boost the effectiveness of your postmortems, with examples of postmortems or procedures that demonstrate these methods.

We’re probably all familiar with Dickens’ story of Scrooge and the Three Ghosts of Christmas, written all the way back in 1843. What we may not know is that ghosts providing visions and teaching lessons is still common practice today! Let’s look into the carol of an ambitious, but unreliable, tech CEO.

My name is Simone Salman, and I’ve been working as a software engineer at Blameless since May 2019. In the spirit of thanks as we’re approaching the holidays, I wanted to reflect on my time at Blameless thus far, and share a few things about the culture that I’m especially grateful for.

Which of the following three scenarios do you experience the most when a new incident occurs? For many teams, incidents unfortunately fall into scenario 1, with some classes of incidents catching them by surprise. It’s astonishing that despite the vast amount of time we spend working on and thinking about our systems, we seem to have very little control over them. If we can’t predict where the next incidents will come from, then we will be forever stuck in a reactive cycle of repair.

For many SREs, Google’s 99.999% availability seems like an untouchable dream. If anything, getting out of pager hell is already worth celebrating with all your coworkers, friends, and family on the moon. How can teams climb out of it? How can you get to a stage where you have time to proactively prevent incidents, and enter a mental state of calm and control? The rope out of pager hell is weaved with a thorough and rigorous postmortem process.

We’re excited to introduce Blameless Swimlanes – a feature that helps to minimize customer impact and enables faster incident resolution by allowing incident commanders to orchestrate parallel streams of investigations for complex incidents.