🚨 Incident Management & Postmortems

Incidents happen—even in well‑engineered systems. Having a clear playbook for responding to them makes the difference between a minor blip and a customer‑impacting outage. I start by classifying incidents using predefined severity levels so we can prioritise work based on business impact. An on‑call rotation ensures that there is always someone responsible for initial diagnosis and that the people who built the system are accountable for keeping it running.

Our response process follows a simple flow: detect and diagnose, mitigate the impact, communicate with stakeholders, recover service, and close the incident. At each step, roles and responsibilities are clear. During the incident we use chat and incident command tools to coordinate and keep a timeline. Once the immediate fire is out, we recover fully and ensure that all systems are back to normal, then formally close the incident.

Learning from incidents is just as important as fixing them. After every incident we write a blameless postmortem that captures the root cause, the timeline of events, and the lessons learned. We identify systemic improvements—whether in code, monitoring, alerting, or process—and we assign owners to follow through. This continuous improvement loop transforms incidents from painful surprises into opportunities for resilience.

We also rehearse our incident playbook through game days and simulations. Practising in a low‑stakes environment builds confidence and uncovers gaps in our runbooks. A solid incident management culture makes it safe to surface issues early and fosters trust across teams and with our users.