• Incident Commander (IC): Coordinates response efforts and makes critical decisions
• Technical Lead: Leads technical investigation and implementation of fixes
• Communications Officer: Manages stakeholder communications
• Operations Team: Executes recovery procedures
• Quality Assurance: Validates fixes and performs testing

• On-call engineer (24/7)
• System administrators
• Database administrators
• Network engineers
• Third-party service providers
• Senior management escalation contacts

1. Assess incident severity:
   
   
2. Notify relevant team members
3. Establish incident communication channel
4. Identify affected systems
5. Gather available information:
   
   
6. Implement immediate mitigation steps

1. 
   Infrastructure Failures
   
   
2. 
   Software-Related Issues
   
   
3. 
   Third-Party Dependencies
   
   
4. 
   Performance Issues
   
   
5. 
   Cybersecurity Incidents
   
   

Prevention is better than cure. Pre-mortem analysis helps identify potential failure points before they occur. Key preparation elements include:

• Regular infrastructure audits
• Redundancy implementation for critical systems
• Backup and disaster recovery procedures
• Automated monitoring setup
• Documentation of system dependencies
• Regular team training and drills
• Updated runbooks and playbooks

Quick problem identification is crucial for minimizing impact. Modern IT environments utilize various monitoring and observability tools:

Log Management and Analysis

• ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)
• Splunk
• Graylog
• Papertrail
• Loggly

Metrics and Monitoring

• Prometheus + Grafana
• Datadog
• New Relic
• Dynatrace
• AppDynamics
• Zabbix
• Nagios

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

• New Relic APM
• Elastic APM
• Datadog APM
• Instana
• Honeycomb

Network Monitoring

• SolarWinds
• PRTG
• Wireshark
• Nagios Network Analyzer
• ThousandEyes

Synthetic Monitoring

• Pingdom
• Catchpoint
• Ghost Inspector
• WebPageTest
• Uptrends

In IT environments, containment typically involves isolating the affected components while maintaining essential services. This phase includes:

• Implementing temporary workarounds
• Feature flagging problematic code
• Rolling back recent changes
• Scaling up healthy resources
• Rerouting traffic away from affected systems

Eradication involves implementing permanent fixes through:

• Code patches
• Configuration updates
• Database repairs
• System upgrades
• Comprehensive testing to ensure fixes don’t introduce new issues

The speed and effectiveness of recovery directly impact business operations:

Immediate Action:

• Minimal data loss
• Limited business impact
• Maintained customer trust
• Lower financial impact
• Faster return to normal operations

Delayed Response:

• Extended system downtime
• Significant data loss potential
• Customer dissatisfaction
• Revenue impact
• Potential SLA violations
• Damage to company reputation

Post-mortems are crucial for organizational learning and system improvement. Their primary goals are:

1. Root Cause Understanding

• Identify the exact chain of events leading to the incident
• Understand why existing safeguards failed
• Determine if similar vulnerabilities exist elsewhere

2. System Improvement

• Transform lessons into concrete action items
• Implement automated preventive measures
• Update monitoring and alerting thresholds
• Enhance documentation and procedures

3. Knowledge Sharing

• Document findings for future reference
• Share lessons across teams
• Update training materials
• Improve incident response procedures

The success of a post-mortem is measured by its ability to prevent similar incidents from recurring through systematic improvements and preventive measures.