Best practices for writing incident postmortems

Postmortems are crucial for preventing future incidents by recording root causes and providing insights into system resilience. However, they can be difficult to produce due to deeper analysis requirements and coordination among busy team members. To streamline the process, workflows that centralize data collection, facilitate discussions, and generate interactive postmortem documents automatically are recommended. Key practices include gathering data in a shared view, automating postmortem generation, using the postmortem as a thinking tool, and making it easy to find later. Datadog's comprehensive platform incorporates these best practices to make writing postmortems seamless and efficient.