Postmortem

Learn how to dig down the problem and find the cause in the log files, as there are always some traces left in the files.

Looking into the problem

At 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time, eight hours after the outage started, our account representative, Tom (not his real name) called for a postmortem.

In operations, “post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” Latin for “you touched it last,” turns out to be a good starting point most of the time. It’s not always right, but it certainly provides a place to begin looking. In fact, when Tom called me, ...