# What is Postmortem?

> A blameless review of what went wrong and how to prevent it recurring.

Canonical: https://www.decimal.app/glossary/postmortem · Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

A postmortem (or incident review) documents an incident's timeline, impact, root cause, and follow-up actions. Blameless postmortems focus on systems, not individuals.

## Why it matters

They turn incidents into lasting fixes. Including support's view adds what customers actually experienced and asked.

## Best practices

1. Write within a week. While details are fresh.
2. Quantify customer impact. Tickets, accounts, and revenue affected.
3. Track action items to completion. An unfinished postmortem prevents nothing.

## How Decimal helps

Decimal's investigation trail and linked tickets give postmortems an accurate timeline of customer impact.

## Related terms

- [Incident](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/incident): An unplanned disruption or degradation of a service that needs an urgent response.
- [Root Cause Analysis (RCA)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/root-cause-analysis): Finding the underlying reason a problem happened, not just its symptoms.
- [Hotfix](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/hotfix): An urgent fix shipped outside the normal release cycle.

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