Glossary · Incidents and alerting
Incident review
A postmortem, also called an incident review or retrospective, is a written account after an incident of what happened, why, how it was handled and what will change so it doesn’t happen again.
A useful postmortem has a timeline with times, the impact (who was affected and for how long), the contributing causes, what went well and what didn’t, and a short list of actions with owners and dates.
Postmortems are blameless: they ask how the system and the process allowed the mistake, not who made it. People who fear blame leave out details, and the details are where the fixes are.
Publishing a short version builds trust. Customers who were affected want to know the outage was understood and what changes; a clear public review often does more for trust than a perfect uptime record.
After an incident in Uptimecheck, write an incident review: what happened, why, and what you’re changing. Keep it for the team, or show it under the incident on your status pages. The incident’s timeline of checks, alerts, acknowledgements and notes gives the review its times.
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Guides 6 min read
A copy-ready incident postmortem template, the blameless principles behind it, a filled-in example from a checkout outage and how to publish a short summary on your status page.
ReadGuides 5 min read
How to tell customers about an outage: who speaks, how often, on which channel and in what words. A one-page plan, severity levels, update cadence and ready-to-use templates for status pages, email and social media.
ReadFor every incident above a set severity, for any incident customers noticed, and for near misses that could have been serious. Write it within a few days, while people remember.
It looks for the conditions that made a mistake possible, such as a missing check, an unclear runbook or a risky default, instead of naming the person who made it.
A public version, without internal names and details, is worth writing for incidents customers noticed. Say what happened, how long it lasted, what caused it and what you are changing.
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