You are writing a postmortem for an incident that severely affected users. You want to prevent similar incidents in the future. Which two of the following sections should you include in the…

Question

Options

• AAn explanation of the root cause of the incident.
• BA list of employees responsible for causing the incident
• CA list of action items to prevent a recurrence of the incident
• DYour opinion of the incident's severity compared to past incidents
• ECopies of the design documents for all the services impacted by the incident

• A
  76% (26)
• B
  3% (1)
• D
  15% (5)
• E
  6% (2)

Explanation

A blameless postmortem has two core objectives: understand what went wrong and prevent it from happening again. Option A (root cause analysis) is essential - without identifying the root cause, you cannot design effective preventive measures. Option C (action items to prevent recurrence) translates the root cause analysis into concrete, trackable work. Option B (list of responsible employees) violates the blameless culture fundamental to SRE postmortems - blame discourages transparency and honest reporting, making future incidents harder to learn from. Option D (opinion on severity) is subjective and not actionable. Option E (design documents for all impacted services) is overly broad, not specific to the incident's cause, and adds noise rather than insight. Effective postmortems are focused, factual, forward-looking, and blameless.

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