[SREday NYC] Reevaluating Post-Incident Reviews

Post-Incident Review. Postmortem. Incident Report. Whatever you call them, they take time and resources, and sometimes you’re not even sure if anyone reads them. The Post-Incident Review is a story. Maybe it’s a bit of a mystery, maybe it’s a feel-good story of redemption. Maybe it’s a buddy comedy. We produce these reports so that other folks in our organization can learn from the things we learned and hopefully not repeat our same mistakes.

Collecting the data and creating the story are work. We’ll talk about how PagerDuty has changed and adapted our methodology over time to produce better reviews that help more engineers get more out of the process and the assets that are produced.

Speaker:
Mandi Walls is a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty and an Advisory Board Member for the Customer Experience Executive Program at Ithaca College. With more than a decade of experience across operations, automation, and community leadership - including nearly nine years in technical and community roles at Chef Software - she brings deep expertise in incident response, service reliability, and practitioner education. A frequent speaker, Mandi focuses on practical DevOps practices and building healthier engineering cultures.