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Incident Response and Postmortem Processes

This document outlines the standard procedures for responding to production incidents and conducting effective postmortem analyses at Bayat. Following these guidelines ensures consistent, efficient handling of incidents and promotes continuous improvement through learning.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The incident response and postmortem processes are designed to:

  1. Minimize Impact: Reduce the duration and severity of incidents
  2. Promote Learning: Learn from incidents to prevent recurrence
  3. Improve Systems: Systematically strengthen our infrastructure and applications
  4. Build Trust: Demonstrate reliability through transparent and effective incident handling

This document focuses on technical incidents affecting production systems, but similar principles can be applied to other types of incidents.

Incident Severity Levels

Incidents are classified into severity levels to determine the appropriate response:

Severity 1 (Critical)

  • Characteristics:

    • Complete service outage affecting all users
    • Data loss or corruption
    • Security breach with significant impact

  • Response Requirements:

    • Immediate response required (24/7)
    • All-hands involvement if needed
    • Executive notification
    • 15-minute maximum response time

  • Examples:

    • Production database unavailable
    • Authentication system complete failure
    • Website completely down

Severity 2 (High)

  • Characteristics:

    • Partial service outage affecting many users
    • Major functionality degraded
    • Performance severely impacted

  • Response Requirements:

    • Prompt response required (24/7)
    • Core team involvement
    • 30-minute maximum response time

  • Examples:

    • Checkout process failing
    • Significant API errors
    • Major performance degradation

Severity 3 (Medium)

  • Characteristics:

    • Minor functionality impacted
    • Performance degradation affecting some users
    • Non-critical systems affected

  • Response Requirements:

    • Response during business hours
    • 2-hour maximum response time

  • Examples:

    • Non-critical features unavailable
    • Minor performance degradation
    • Isolated errors affecting limited functionality

Severity 4 (Low)

  • Characteristics:

    • Minimal impact on users
    • Cosmetic issues
    • Easily worked around

  • Response Requirements:

    • Can be scheduled for regular maintenance
    • 8-hour or next business day response

  • Examples:

    • UI glitches
    • Minor reporting inaccuracies
    • Issues affecting internal-only features

Incident Response Process

The incident response process follows these key phases:

Detection

  1. Monitoring Alerts: Automated system that detects and notifies of potential incidents
  2. User Reports: Tracking and responding to user-reported issues
  3. Proactive Checks: Regular health checks and monitoring to catch issues early

Key Actions

  • Confirm the incident is real and gather initial data
  • Make an initial severity assessment
  • Start the incident response process for confirmed incidents

Response

  1. Incident Declaration:

    • Declare the incident formally
    • Determine severity level
    • Assign Incident Commander

  2. Team Assembly:

    • Assemble appropriate response team based on severity
    • Establish communication channels

  3. Initial Assessment:

    • Confirm scope and impact
    • Identify affected systems
    • Document initial findings

Remediation

  1. Mitigation Strategy:

    • Determine immediate steps to reduce impact
    • Consider temporary workarounds

  2. Implementation:

    • Execute mitigation steps
    • Document all actions taken
    • Test effectiveness of mitigation

  3. Root Cause Investigation:

    • Begin investigating underlying causes
    • Gather relevant logs and metrics
    • Document findings for later analysis

Recovery

  1. Service Restoration:

    • Implement full service restoration
    • Verify all systems are functioning properly
    • Monitor for any residual issues

  2. All-Clear Declaration:

    • Formally declare the incident resolved
    • Notify all stakeholders
    • Schedule postmortem meeting

Communication During Incidents

Internal Communication

  • Primary Channel: Dedicated incident response channel in Slack/Teams
  • Updates: Regular status updates at predefined intervals
  • Handoffs: Clear documentation of context when transferring ownership

External Communication

  • Customer Communication:

    • Public status page updates
    • Email/SMS notifications for critical incidents
    • Social media updates for widespread issues

  • Timing:

    • Initial notification within 30 minutes of confirmed Sev1/Sev2 incidents
    • Updates at least every 60 minutes
    • Resolution notification and summary

  • Content Guidelines:

    • Be honest and transparent
    • Avoid technical jargon
    • Focus on impact and mitigation
    • Provide workarounds when available
    • Commit only to what is certain

Postmortem Process

Postmortems are conducted for all Severity 1 and 2 incidents, and optionally for lower severity incidents with learning potential.

Scheduling

  • Schedule within 2 business days of incident resolution
  • Include all key participants from the incident
  • Allocate sufficient time (usually 60-90 minutes)

Postmortem Document Template

Each postmortem document should include:

  1. Incident Summary

    • Date, time, and duration
    • Severity level
    • Systems affected
    • Customer impact
    • Response team members

  2. Timeline

    • Detection time and method
    • Key events during the incident
    • Remediation steps and their effects
    • Resolution time

  3. Root Cause Analysis

    • Primary cause(s)
    • Contributing factors
    • Trigger events

  4. What Went Well

    • Effective detection mechanisms
    • Successful mitigation strategies
    • Good team collaboration
    • Effective tools and processes

  5. What Went Poorly

    • Delayed detection or response
    • Ineffective mitigation attempts
    • Communication issues
    • Process or tooling gaps

  6. Corrective Actions

    • Specific, actionable items
    • Assigned owners
    • Due dates
    • Success criteria

  7. Lessons Learned

    • Key insights from the incident
    • Broader implications for systems or processes

Root Cause Analysis

Root cause analysis should follow these principles:

  1. Blameless Culture:

    • Focus on systems and processes, not individuals
    • Assume everyone acted with the best intentions
    • Seek understanding, not blame

  2. Five Whys Technique:

    • Ask "why" repeatedly to dig deeper
    • Move beyond symptoms to underlying causes
    • Identify both technical and organizational factors

  3. Contributing Factors:

    • Identify all factors that contributed to the incident
    • Consider technical, process, and human factors
    • Look for patterns across multiple incidents

Corrective Actions

Effective corrective actions should be:

  1. Specific: Clearly defined with concrete deliverables
  2. Measurable: Success can be objectively verified
  3. Assigned: Clear owner responsible for implementation
  4. Realistic: Can be accomplished with available resources
  5. Time-bound: Has a defined deadline

Categories of corrective actions:

  • Technical Improvements: Code changes, architectural improvements
  • Process Improvements: Documentation, runbooks, decision processes
  • Monitoring Improvements: New alerts, dashboards, visibility
  • Training/Knowledge: Sharing learnings, conducting trainings
  • Automation: Reducing manual steps and human error

Incident Response Roles

Incident Commander (IC)

  • Responsibilities:

    • Overall coordination of the incident response
    • Facilitating communication
    • Making key decisions
    • Ensuring all aspects of the incident are addressed

  • Selection Criteria:

    • Strong communication skills
    • Calm under pressure
    • Good judgment
    • Familiarity with incident response process

Technical Lead

  • Responsibilities:
    • Leading technical investigation
    • Coordinating technical remediation efforts
    • Providing technical context to the IC

Communications Lead

  • Responsibilities:
    • Drafting and sending external communications
    • Updating status page
    • Coordinating with customer support
    • Keeping stakeholders informed

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

  • Responsibilities:
    • Providing deep expertise on affected systems
    • Implementing technical fixes
    • Advising on potential impacts

Scribe

  • Responsibilities:
    • Documenting the incident timeline
    • Taking notes during calls
    • Collecting relevant information for the postmortem

Tools and Resources

Monitoring and Detection

  • Recommended monitoring tools: Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus/Grafana
  • Alert configuration standards
  • Escalation policies and on-call rotations

Response Coordination

  • Incident management platform (e.g., PagerDuty, OpsGenie)
  • Communication channels (Slack/Teams dedicated channels)
  • Video conferencing for incident calls
  • Shared documents for real-time collaboration

Documentation

  • Incident response runbooks
  • System architecture diagrams
  • Service dependency maps
  • Contact lists and escalation paths
  • Postmortem templates

Training and Drills

Training Program

  • New Employee Onboarding:

    • Incident response process overview
    • Tool familiarization
    • Role-specific training

  • Ongoing Training:

    • Quarterly refreshers
    • Role-specific deep dives
    • Case studies from past incidents

Incident Simulation Drills

  • Schedule: Quarterly scheduled drills
  • Scenarios: Rotating through different types of failures
  • Participation: Rotating team members through different roles
  • Evaluation: Assessing effectiveness and identifying improvements

Game Day Exercises

  • Purpose: Testing complex failure scenarios in production-like environments
  • Preparation: Detailed scenario planning and safety measures
  • Execution: Controlled introduction of failures
  • Learning: Documenting findings and improvements

Continuous Improvement

The incident response and postmortem processes should evolve based on:

  1. Feedback: Regular review of process effectiveness
  2. Incident Patterns: Addressing recurring themes
  3. Industry Best Practices: Incorporating external learnings
  4. Technological Changes: Adapting to changing infrastructure

Review this document and associated procedures at least semi-annually.