Mastering the Blameless Retrospective (Postmortem)

Nick:

Hello, my name is Nick. I am a solutions engineer here at Blameless, and today we are going to walk through a Blameless retrospective. The retrospective or the post-incident analysis is a great vehicle for the team to document what went wrong during an incident and what steps were used to troubleshoot and resolve the problem, while also gathering key information related to your incident management process as a whole. What worked, what can be improved upon, and much, much more.

Let's go ahead and get right into this. Anytime you create an incident using Blameless, a dedicated incident retrospective will automatically be created and linked to that incident. At the top, you can see some high level information related to this retrospective; the severity, the current state it's in, when it was created, and last updated, who is in charge of completing this retro, as well as a link to the incident record if you need to get more information.

The incident timeline is automatically brought over from the incident record to avoid copying and pasting important information. There are two main vehicles for learning in a Blameless retrospective. The overview in the analysis sections. Analysis is our in-house collaborative text editor. Simply drop in a markdown file when creating your incident type and this will act as a template you and the team can use to collaborate together in real time. We also have our overview section or what we call custom questions. You can organize frequently asked and important questions in a structured manner so the team knows exactly what they need to answer to move this retro to a publishable state. And want to know the best part about all of this? All this information is reportable within Blameless's Reliability Insights feature. Moving down, you could see your impact timing metrics, the tags you've captured during the incident, and any follow up actions all documented in one location so you and the team can keep all important incident information in one location.

And finally, you move the retrospective to a published state. Blameless will automatically archive the dedicated incident Slack channel for you. Cleaning up is just as important as setting up the incident. Remember, incident management is meant to be iterative. Completing blameless retrospectives will help you and the team learn about what you're doing well, while also uncovering areas to improve upon in your incident management process. Blameless retrospectives are your first stop for learning how you could drive towards a more streamlined SRE culture. Thanks so much for watching, and if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to support@blameless.com.