Beyond Outages: The Post-Incident Reviews We Should Have Had

In the past year alone, we've seen just how much a single outage can disrupt and how much stronger teams become when they learn from it. From the July 16, 2024 incident to the widespread June 2025 outage, it's clear that incidents are inevitable. The question is: how do you transform each disruption into an opportunity to improve your processes for the next one?

In this blog, we explore best practices for learning from incidents and how to get started with PagerDuty's Post-Incident Reviews (now available to all paid Incident Management and Customer Service Operations plans).

Outage Recovery is Just the Beginning

Recovery gets you back online, but what you do after the incident determines whether your team just moves on or actually moves forward. Effective teams engage in post-incident analysis , a structured process that goes beyond basic documentation. This analysis examines root causes, system interactions, and human factors to transform raw incident data into actionable insights that shift your team from reactive firefighting to proactive improvement.

That's why we've made PagerDuty's Post-Incident Reviews available to all Professional and Business plan customers. This is part of our updated packaging to ensure that teams go beyond response and build the kind of operational muscle that turns every incident into an opportunity to get better.

Building a Blameless Culture

Before effective post-incident reviews can take place, organizations need to establish a blameless culture. This isn't just a nice-to-have-it's essential for honest, productive learning.

A blameless approach focuses on systems and processes while still examining individual decision-making-not to assign blame, but to understand the responder's mental model in that moment. This curiosity about human factors leads to better processes and documentation, but it's only effective when people feel safe to share their thinking without fear. This approach doesn't just improve team morale, it provides executives and stakeholders with more accurate and actionable insights. When teams aren't afraid to be transparent about what went wrong, organizations gain a clearer picture of their operational strengths and weaknesses, enabling more informed decision-making at all levels.

Post-Incident Analysis with PagerDuty: Turn Outages into Insights

Post-incident reviews have traditionally been manual, time-consuming, and easy to push off. Some vendors might suggest a simple summary is sufficient, but that's not enough and leaves your team just as exposed as before. Effective analysis requires dedicated time to discuss what happened and capture actionable improvements to systems and processes. What separates resilient organizations from those that remain vulnerable is the ability to convert documented incidents into institutional knowledge that prevents future failures.

This is why we've built our platform with a learning component in mind. At the heart of PagerDuty's Post-Incident Reviews is the Narrative Builder , which eliminates the manual work of reconstructing what happened during an incident. No more pulling screenshots or digging through Slack threads. It automatically collects and analyzes data from incident details, Slack conversations (and soon Microsoft Teams), Jira tickets, and custom integrations. This way, nothing falls through the cracks, giving you a clear, complete picture of exactly what went down.

Make Learning the Norm, Not the Exception

With PagerDuty's Post-Incident Reviews, teams can turn every incident into shared, actionable learning, instead of knowledge getting trapped in chat threads or siloed docs. Our automatically generated, customizable reports help teams:

• Spot trends and recurring patterns
• Share learnings and best practices across teams
• Track follow-up action directly in the platform
• Measure what's working, and what isn't
• Build a searchable knowledge base that improves with every incident

Our Learning Center provides a high-level overview of incident patterns across your organization, helping you identify opportunities for improvement by analyzing participation, on-call patterns, and impact on people and systems. This turns reviews from a check-box task into a critical part of staying resilient. The kind that strengthens your org before the next outage hits.

Getting Started with PagerDuty's Post-Incident Reviews

Ready to level up how your team learns from incidents? Here's how to turn on PagerDuty's Post-Incident Reviews:

1. Go to your settings page (http://[yoursubdomain].pagerduty.com/account/settings)
2. Select the Jeli Post-Incident Reviews tab
3. Click toggle "Enable Jeli Post-Incident Reviews"

For effective post-incident reviews, our comprehensive Howie Guide to Post-Incident Reviews offers tips and best practices to get started. It recommends focusing on learning rather than blame, involving the right people, establishing clear timelines, and creating actionable follow-ups. It's all about understanding "how we got here" rather than just simply documenting what broke.

New to incident reviews? Take our product tour or check out this Knowledge Base article to learn everything you need to get the most out of this powerful feature.

Stay Ready for What's Next

The next big outage is coming. What matters is whether your team gets better after the last one. Want to be in the more prepared cohort? According to our platform data from the June 12 outage , operationally mature organizations recovered up to 52% faster than their peers and experienced 27% less business impact . This isn't a coincidence, it's the result of teams having established end-to-end incident management processes where learning and improvement are fundamental components.

Want to see PagerDuty's Post-Incident Reviews in action? Register for our upcoming Demo Roundup , or visit our pricing page to find the plan that fits your team.