My first made up postmortem/ Incident Report
A postmortem report based on a fictional outage scenario where the database suddenly went missing.
Incident Report Components:
The structure is actually surprisingly simple and yet powerful. The report is made up of five parts,
- Issue Summary
- Timeline
- Root Cause
- Resolution and Recovery
- Corrective and Preventative Measures
Postmortem Report: Database Vanished
Issue Summary
Duration of the Outage: June 10, 2024, 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM UTC (2 hours)
Impact:
- Our entire database vanished into thin air, resulting in a complete service outage.
- Users experienced errors and data loss, leading to widespread panic and confusion.
- 100% of users were affected, causing major disruption to business operations.
Root Cause: A junior developer accidentally executed a command that deleted the entire production database.
Timeline
- 11:00 AM: The issue was detected when users began reporting errors and data loss.
- 11:05 AM: On-call engineer receives pager alert and immediately investigates.
- 11:10 AM: Initial investigation reveals that the database is completely empty.
- 11:15 AM: Misleading path: Checked for potential network issues, suspected a data breach.
- 11:25 AM: Discovered that a database deletion command was executed.
- 11:30 AM: Incident escalated to the Database and DevOps teams.
- 11:40 AM: Confirmed the deletion was accidental, not a malicious attack.
- 11:45 AM: Began restoring the database from the latest backup.
- 12:30 PM: Database restoration completed.
- 12:45 PM: Verified data integrity and application functionality.
- 1:00 PM: Declared the incident resolved; services fully restored.
Root Cause and Resolution
Root Cause: The outage was caused by a junior developer accidentally executing a DROP DATABASE command on the production database. This command deleted the entire database, causing all data to be lost.
Resolution:
- Identified the accidental execution of the
DROP DATABASEcommand. - Initiated the restoration process from the most recent backup.
- Monitored the restoration process to ensure data integrity.
- Verified that the database was fully restored and the application was functioning correctly.
Corrective and Preventative Measures
Improvements and Fixes:
- Implement strict access controls and permissions to prevent unauthorized execution of destructive commands.
- Introduce additional checks and confirmations before executing critical commands in the production environment.
- Enhance backup procedures to ensure more frequent backups and faster restoration times.
Tasks to Address the Issue:
- Update Access Controls:
- Review and update user permissions to restrict access to critical database commands.
2. Implement Command Confirmation:
- Develop a system that requires additional confirmation before executing commands that can cause significant data loss.
3. Enhance Backup Procedures:
- Increase the frequency of database backups to minimize data loss in future incidents.
- Implement faster restoration processes to reduce downtime.
4. Train Staff:
- Conduct training sessions for all developers on the importance of caution when working with production databases.
- Provide guidelines and best practices for safe database management.
Closing Remarks
We understand the significant impact this incident had on our users and operations. We have taken immediate steps to prevent such incidents in the future by implementing stricter controls and enhancing our backup and restoration processes. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we continue to improve our systems and procedures.
Sincerely,
The DevOps Team
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