Real-World SRE

When to write a postmortem document

One question I often get from people when starting to document postmortems in an organization is "should I write a postmortem?" There are many different ways that organizations decide on when to write a postmortem, but I have a simple rule I like to follow—if someone asks for a postmortem, you should write one. In a large organization, this works great, because someone will often ask, "What was that incident last night all about?" or "Will there be a postmortem for last week's outage?" These are cues that a document should be created.

In a smaller organization, it is more difficult because, often, it will be you deciding whether you should document the incident. To determine whether you should, you could come ...