The PagerDuty Post-Mortem Handbook

Our internal incident response documentation is something we’ve built up over the last few years as we’ve learned from our mistakes. It details the best practices of our process, from how to prepare new employees for on-call responsibilities, to how to handle major incidents, both in preparation and after-work. Few companies seem to talk about their internal processes for dealing with major incidents. It’s sometimes considered taboo to even mention the word “incident” in any sort of communication. We would like to change that.

To that end, we’d like to share how we here at PagerDuty conduct post-mortems internally. It is our hope that others will use the documentation as a starting point to formalize their own processes. This guide provides information on what to do after a major incident and shares PagerDuty’s follow-up and after-action review procedures.