In an incident review, teams discuss causes, resolutions, and opportunities to improve future responses.

What happens in an incident review? A candid look at learning from outages with PagerDuty

When an incident hits, your team pivots from firefighting to figuring out what happened and how to bounce back faster next time. Then comes the moment many people dread but most teams value: the post-incident review. It’s not about blame or pointing fingers. It’s about clarity, learning, and turning a stressful moment into real improvements. If you’ve ever wondered what actually goes on in those sessions, here’s a practical tour.

The core idea: a calm, constructive discussion about causes and resolutions

Let me explain what sits at the heart of an incident review. The goal is straightforward: talk through the incident’s causes and the responses that followed, and use those insights to strengthen future performance. It’s a structured conversation, but it’s also an open space where team members can share what they saw, what surprised them, and what could be done differently next time.

Think of it as a guided debrief that keeps learning front and center. You’re not auditing people; you’re validating systems, signals, and processes. You’re probing the chain of events to separate symptoms from root causes. You’re also identifying the small, practical tweaks that make a real difference in how quickly a problem is detected and contained in the future.

A quick reality check: what really happens during the session

Here’s the typical arc you’ll see in a well-facilitated incident review:

• The timeline refresh: someone lays out a concise narrative of what happened from trigger to resolution. The team checks the timestamps, communications, and any monitoring alerts that sounded the alarms. The aim is a shared, accurate sequence that everyone can reference.

• Root-cause discussion: with the timeline in mind, the group asks why certain decisions were made and what contributed to the problem. This isn’t about naming culprits; it’s about understanding systemic gaps—like gaps in monitoring, ambiguous runbooks, or misaligned handoffs.

• Response evaluation: what worked well? where did things stumble? This is the place to acknowledge robust decisions, smart use of automation, and moments of exceptional teamwork—while also flagging bottlenecks or missteps.

• Learning and action ideas: the team surfaces changes that will reduce risk going forward. These ideas become concrete items with owners and due dates.

• Documentation and knowledge sharing: insights are captured so they live beyond the meeting. That often means updating runbooks, incident runbooks, or the knowledge base so a future responder isn’t rediscovering the wheel.

• Sign-off and follow-up: leadership or the incident owner reviews the proposed improvements, confirms priorities, and ensures there’s a path to implementation. The meeting ends with a clear sense of next steps.

A blameless environment is non-negotiable

A key ingredient in any healthy incident review is psychological safety. If people feel blamed, they’ll hide details next time, and the system loses visibility exactly where you need it most. A blameless posture isn’t soft—it’s strategic. It invites honesty, which makes the data richer and the improvements sturdier.

In practice, that means framing language carefully. Phrases like “What did we miss?” or “What would prevent this next time?” tend to yield more actionable outcomes than, “Who messed this up?” The goal is to surface root causes—technical gaps, process gaps, or miscommunications—not to assign fault.

The flow matters, but so does the timing

While every team tailors its review to its context, most sessions are efficient and tightly focused. A typical 60-to-90-minute window works well for many teams, especially when you’ve built a habit of quick, accurate post-incident write-ups. You don’t want to drag this out; you want momentum. If you’re seeing recurring themes across incidents, a series of shorter, focused reviews can deepen learning without burning people out.

A practical note: the review isn’t the only output

Two natural outcomes follow the discussion:

• Action items that shift behavior and tooling. These could be changes to the runbook, tweaks to alert thresholds, or a new automation to handle a common failure mode. Assign owners and due dates so momentum doesn’t stall.

• Enhanced documentation. The goal is to create a living knowledge base—precisely where responders can quickly find how to respond next time, not a dusty archive. In PagerDuty, for example, incident timelines and post-incident notes can feed back into runbooks or a central knowledge repository, so the next responder isn’t starting from scratch.

A quick detour: why the practical wins matter

You might wonder, “Is this worth the effort?” The answer is yes, especially in high-stakes environments where outages ripple through customers, revenue, and trust. When teams engage in honest analysis, you shorten reaction times, reduce radiating confusion, and cut the time to containment. You end up with fewer escalations, more accurate alerts, and clearer ownership. It’s not glamorous, but it’s incredibly effective.

A few real-world tangents that fit naturally here

• Monitoring and signal quality: The incident review often surfaces whether the alerts that woke the team were well-timed and meaningful. If alerts are too noisy or too sparse, you’ll see it reflected in the discussion. The fix might mean new dashboards, smarter alerting, or a more accurate on-call schedule.

• Runbooks that actually guide action: A runbook isn’t a trophy on the wall—it’s a living, breathing guide. The review is where you catch gaps, like a step missing in containment or a recovery step that could be automated. When runbooks are up-to-date, responders spend less time wondering what to do and more time resolving.

• Cross-team collaboration: Outages often cross boundaries—dev, ops, security, product. A productive review invites input from all impacted teams. It helps those teams speak a common language and reduces fragile handoffs in the heat of a crisis.

• Knowledge sharing without overload: A good review seeds bite-sized learning, not a monolith of documentation. Short, targeted updates that point to a reference in PagerDuty’s knowledge base or a runbook can be exactly what someone needs in a future incident.

How the PagerDuty angle fits into the review

PagerDuty isn’t just about alerting; it’s about orchestrating response and capturing what you learn. In the review, you’ll often see:

• A clear incident timeline that shows when events happened, who coordinated actions, and what mitigations were applied. This timeline becomes a backbone for the discussion and a reference point for future incidents.

• Post-incident notes that summarize what went well and what needs reflection. Those notes can feed directly into knowledge articles or runbook updates, making future responses smoother.

• Structured knowledge and runbooks that reflect the lessons learned. When improvements are documented in a centralized place, responders across teams can leverage them without reinventing the wheel.

• Collaboration tools that encourage open dialogue. A review benefits from a shared space where stakeholders can contribute even if they weren’t on the call in real time.

Tips for a sharper, more productive review

• Prepare a concise timeline beforehand: A clear narrative helps everyone align quickly.

• Focus on root causes, not symptoms: It’s easy to chase a single misstep. The smarter move is connecting the dots to the underlying systems and processes.

• Capture concrete action items: Each item should have an owner and a due date. It’s amazing how small tasks—like updating a runbook or tweaking an alert rule—pile up into big wins.

• Keep the discussion inclusive: Invite voices from different roles. The more perspectives you have, the more robust the learning.

• Close the loop: Revisit the incident after changes are in place. Did the improvements prevent a repeat, or did gaps remain? Close the feedback loop so the team can tighten the cycle.

A closing thought: turning pressure into progress

Incidents are stressful. They disrupt plans, frustrate customers, and test team cohesion. The incident review reframes that pressure as progress. It’s the moment where you transform a chaotic incident into a clearer playbook, a more reliable alerting chain, and a stronger sense of team capability. When teams lean into honest dialogue, the next outage doesn’t feel like a disaster waiting to happen—it becomes a learning moment that makes the whole system more resilient.

If you’ve been on the fence about the value of these reviews, consider this: the more you practice good post-incident discussions, the sharper your detection, containment, and recovery become. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s continuous improvement built on trust, clarity, and shared commitment. With tools like PagerDuty helping to align timelines, notes, and knowledge, your incident reviews can become the predictable, productive heartbeat of a resilient organization. And that, in turn, makes work safer, smoother, and a lot less stressful when the next incident rolls in.