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Hall of FameJohn Lunney, Sue Lueder (Google SRE)20169 min readintermediate

Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure

Read on sre.googleHN 2·0 comments

Summary

Google SRE advocates for a blameless postmortem culture to learn from inevitable incidents in complex distributed systems. Postmortems document incidents, identify root causes, and drive preventive actions, focusing on systemic improvements rather than individual blame.

  • Postmortems are mandatory for significant incidents, triggered by criteria like user impact, data loss, or on-call intervention.
  • A blameless culture is crucial, focusing on systemic issues and assuming good intentions to encourage transparency and prevent hiding problems.
  • Postmortems are collaborative documents, undergoing formal review by senior engineers and shared broadly to disseminate lessons learned.
  • Cultivating this culture requires continuous effort, senior management support, and visible rewards for effective participation.

Site Reliability Engineers and engineering leaders should care about this article for its practical guidance on establishing and nurturing an effective, blameless postmortem culture to improve system reliability and organizational learning.

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