Postmortems and lessons learned

After concluding the troubleshooting process, a postmortem (short for retrospective analysis) should be performed. Typically, this consists of several questions and short but informative answers to each of them. These questions are as follows:

• What happened?

We may be able to answer this question better now than when we started the troubleshooting process since, initially, we may have been looking at a subset of effects.

• Why did it happen?

This is the chain of relevant events that have been backtracked to the root causes of the issue. These may be both technical and procedural. All of them must be addressed. As a technical troubleshooter, you may only be able to cover the technical aspects of this question.

• How did you respond and recover?

Provide a brief and factual outline of the steps taken to troubleshoot the issue. It may be useful to present this as a timeline.

• What can be done to prevent similar...