POSTMORTEM-BLAMELESS

SRE / DevOps concept Blameless postmortem.

Definition

A blameless postmortem is a document written after every significant incident. It describes what happened (timeline), why, and what corrective actions are committed — without attributing individual blame. The idea is that if a human made a mistake, the system allowed the mistake. Encourages transparency and organisational learning.

Origin

Concept formalised by John Allspaw (Etsy) in 'Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture' (2012).

Example in context

After an EDI mapping incident that duplicated 5,000 orders, the postmortem describes the lack of idempotency check and proposes a Kafka transactional-outbox fix.

Related terms

• Runbook EDI — operational doc post-postmortem.