After the outage: write a postmortem that changes something
A timeline, verified impact and concrete actions. A useful incident record helps the team more than a search for someone to blame.
A blog about reliable operations.
Practical reading on outages, servers and monitoring. Know what to watch, where to look for a fault and how to get back online.
Outages
Your website is down. What should you do in the first 15 minutes?
A calm route from the first alert to recovery. Confirm the impact, pause changes and avoid losing time to random restarts.
More articles
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When repeated requests make an outage worse
Timeouts, bounded retries and idempotency. Prevent a small dependency failure from spreading through the whole system.
Your API returns 200. Does that mean it works?
From a reachable endpoint to a usable service. Check response meaning, latency and dependencies as well as status codes.
Cron is silent. How do you know the nightly job ran?
Your website can stay healthy while backups and imports stop. Heartbeats track jobs without a public endpoint of their own.
You have a backup. Can you restore the service?
A successful backup job is only the beginning. RPO, RTO and regular restore tests show how much protection your data really has.
Monitoring that does not wake you for every blip
Distinguish an incident from a brief fluctuation and set up notifications your team can trust.
Your SSL certificate renews automatically. What if it does not?
Renewal can fail because of DNS, permissions or configuration. Monitor the certificate visitors actually receive.
The server works, the website does not. Could it be DNS?
Separate DNS failures from application failures and prepare record changes without avoidable downtime.
Your server is slowing down. Which numbers explain why?
CPU is only part of the picture. Connect latency, errors, memory, disk and queues when looking for a bottleneck.