What is Postmortem?

Blameless postmortems are a cornerstone of DevOps and SRE culture. After an incident, the team documents a timeline of events, identifies contributing factors (not root cause, as incidents rarely have a single cause), evaluates what went well (detection, response), and defines action items to prevent recurrence. The blameless aspect is crucial — focusing on systemic improvements rather than individual mistakes encourages honesty and learning. Effective postmortems improve organizational resilience over time and build a knowledge base of failure patterns.