What are post-incident reviews?

Post-incident reviews (PIRs) bring people and teams together to discuss the details of an incident: why it happened, what impact it had, what actions were taken to resolve it, and how the team can prevent it from happening again.

While the goal of resolving an incident is to minimize the impact of an issue with a quick return to business-as-usual, the goal of completing a post-incident review is to learn from those incidents, turning them from frustrations to opportunities.

PIRs give you a chance to uncover vulnerabilities in your system, stop repeat incidents, and decrease time to incident resolution in the future, and are an important step in the lifecycle of an always-on service. The findings from your review should feed back into your planning process to ensure that critical fixes find a place in upcoming work. Documenting the incident and how the team resolved it can inform how future incidents are handled. 

Another benefit of a formal, written post-incident review is that it allows everyone who worked on an incident to contribute what they learned, and can build trust and resiliency within your team.

Partners, customers, and other users may also want to know what happened during an outage and what steps you’ve taken to improve their experience. After completing your PIR, making the findings available on your public-facing website may not be appropriate in all cases, but your marketing or PR team can help you craft the language so people get the information in a way that is informative and builds trust in your services.

Learn more about best practices for post-incident reviews.