Operations Anti-Patterns, DevOps Solutions

9 Wasting a perfectly good incident

This chapter covers

• Conducting blameless postmortems
• Addressing the mental models people have during an incident
• Generating action items that further the improvement of the system

When something unexpected or unplanned occurs that creates an adverse effect on the system, I define that action as an incident. Some companies reserve the term for large catastrophic events, but with this broader definition, you get to increase the learning opportunities on your team when an incident occurs.

As mentioned previously, at the center of DevOps is the idea of continuous improvement. Incremental change is a win in a DevOps organization. But the fuel that powers that continuous improvement is continual learning--learning ...