More Aim, Less Blame: How to use postmortems to turn failures into something valuable for your team
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Mistakes and failure are inevitable. Instead of being afraid of them, we should use them as lessons that help identify weak points in our organisations and systems. One way to do this is by writing blameless postmortems. Daniel details exactly how postmortems can help organizations and teams focus on improvement, and how that boosts work morale, makes products better, and strengthens your relationship with customers.
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More Aim, Less Blame: How to use postmortems to turn failures into something valuable for your team
- 2. How do you feel after a conference?
- 3. Inspired!
- 4. Empowered!
- 7. Chief Enterprise Architect @ SiteGround About Me - @dvkanchev DevOps Engineer/SRE Adrenaline Junkie (snowboarding, sailing, parenting) Safety Enthusiast
- 8. Focuses on culture and not technology Based on technical failures examples But valid for handling all types of failures About This Talk
- 10. “A postmortem is a written record of an incident, its impact, the actions taken to mitigate or resolve it, the root cause(s), and the follow-up actions to prevent the incident from recurring.”
- 11. Website Downtime
- 12. Site Is Broken. What Do You Do?
- 13. I just fix it Fix it + postmortem Someone else fixes such problems for me 1 2 3
- 14. I just fix it - 82% Fix it + postmortem - 12% Someone else fixes such problems for me - 6% 1 2 3
- 15. “Successful Software Never Gets Simpler”
- 16. Blame, Sanctions And Accountability
- 17. Blame, Sanctions And Accountability Issue (root cause): “A backup script was run against the production database. It locked all tables and caused downtime.”
- 18. Issue (root cause): “A backup script was run against the production database. It locked all tables and caused downtime.” BAD! Blame, Sanctions And Accountability
- 19. Issue (root cause): “A backup script was run against the production database. It locked all tables and caused downtime.” BAD! Issue (root cause): “I (Daniel) ran a backup script against the production database. It locked all tables and caused downtime. Why is this script not configured to use --single-transaction for InnoDB tables?” Blame, Sanctions And Accountability
- 20. Issue (root cause): “A backup script was run against the production database. It locked all tables and caused downtime.” BAD! Issue (root cause): “I (Daniel) ran a backup script against the production database. It locked all tables and caused downtime. Why is this script not configured to use --single-transaction for InnoDB tables?” BETTER! Blame, Sanctions And Accountability
- 21. “Safety requires prevention, prevention requires honesty, honesty requires absence of fear.”
- 23. “Focus on the situational aspects of a failure’s mechanism AND the decision-making process of individuals proximate to the failure.”
- 24. Post-mortem template. The obvious stuff.
- 25. Post-mortem template. The obvious stuff. Describe the incident and the impact?1
- 26. Post-mortem template. The obvious stuff. Describe the incident and the impact? How was it solved? 1 2
- 27. Post-mortem template. The obvious stuff. Describe the incident and the impact? How was it solved? Complete timeline of events. 1 2 3
- 28. Table Timeline Example 03:45 AM Monitoring system detected high rate of 5xx errors
- 29. Table Timeline Example 03:45 AM Monitoring system detected high rate of 5xx errors 03:46 AM Monitoring system paged engineer on call
- 30. Table Timeline Example 03:45 AM Monitoring system detected high rate of 5xx errors 03:46 AM Monitoring system paged engineer on call 03:47 AM Incident was confirmed
- 31. Table Timeline Example 03:45 AM Monitoring system detected high rate of 5xx errors 03:46 AM Monitoring system paged engineer on call 03:47 AM Incident was confirmed 03:53 AM Graphs were checked and 10 times increase in traffic towards Redis was observed
- 32. Table Timeline Example 03:45 AM Monitoring system detected high rate of 5xx errors 03:46 AM Monitoring system paged engineer on call 03:47 AM Incident was confirmed 03:53 AM Graphs were checked and 10 times increase in traffic towards Redis was observed 04:25 AM Issue was escalated to a senior engineer
- 33. Table Timeline Example 03:45 AM Monitoring system detected high rate of 5xx errors 03:46 AM Monitoring system paged engineer on call 03:47 AM Incident was confirmed 03:53 AM Graphs were checked and 10 times increase in traffic towards Redis was observed 04:25 AM Issue was escalated to a senior engineer 04:52 AM WordPress plugin was downgraded to fix the issue
- 34. Post-mortem template. The obvious stuff. Describe the incident and the impact? How was it solved? Complete timeline of events. Root Cause(s) Analysis? 1 2 3 4
- 35. Post-mortem template. The obvious stuff. Describe the incident and the impact? How was it solved? Complete timeline of events. Root Cause(s) Analysis? Lessons learned. 1 2 3 4 5
- 36. Post-mortem template. The obvious stuff. Describe the incident and the impact? How was it solved? Complete timeline of events. Root Cause(s) Analysis? Lessons learned. Action Item List. 1 2 3 4 5 6
- 37. Post-mortem template. The obvious stuff. Describe the incident and the impact? How was it solved? Complete timeline of events. Root Cause(s) Analysis? Lessons learned. Action Item List. Post-Mortem Review and Approval. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
- 38. Post-mortem template. The hidden gems.
- 39. Post-mortem template. The hidden gems. Different Triggers/Contributors.1
- 40. Post-mortem template. The hidden gems. Different Triggers/Contributors. Mitigators. 1 2
- 41. Post-mortem template. The hidden gems. Different Triggers/Contributors. Mitigators. Additions to the Timeline of Events. 1 2 3
- 42. Time escalations dev on-call dev DBA customer service network engineer security engineer
- 43. Time escalations dev on-call dev DBA customer service network engineer security engineer
- 44. Time escalations dev on-call dev DBA customer service network engineer security engineer
- 45. escalations on-call dev DBA customer service network engineer security engineer Called for assistance On poor conference wifi Starts checking backups and preparing for restore Unrelated alerts for connected systems Working on a theory related to load balancing as new data is obtained
- 46. Post-mortem template. The hidden gems. Different Triggers/Contributors. Mitigators. Additions to the Timeline of Events. Islands of Knowledge. 1 2 3 4
- 47. Post-mortem template. The hidden gems. Different Triggers/Contributors. Mitigators. Additions to the Timeline of Events. Islands of Knowledge. Open discussions. 1 2 3 4 5
- 48. Step Back
- 49. Example Time
- 50. The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them! Ernest Hemingway ” “
- 53. Questions