# Grab You Some Post-Mortem Reports

[Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab) · Lian Yuanlin · Feb 4, 2016

**Type:** Problem & solution

## Summary

Grab uses a Service-Oriented Architecture to deploy features quickly, but unfamiliarity across teams makes cross-service production debugging difficult. Historical incident reports lacked context, diagnostic details, impact data, and timelines, leaving outside engineers unable to learn from past outages. To address this, Grab established a four-pillar framework for post-mortem reports covering chronology, context, empowerment, and solutions. The approach mandates blameless, educational write-ups that categorize post-incident improvements across people, product, and process dimensions. Final reports undergo peer reviews by engineers from external teams to ensure clarity and remove bias.

## Context

Cross-team debugging during production issues was difficult in Grab's Service-Oriented Architecture due to unfamiliarity with other teams' code, exacerbated by brief post-mortem reports lacking context, timelines, and investigation details.

## Approach / What changed

Grab established a standardized post-mortem benchmark requiring four key elements—chronology, context, empowerment, and solutions—along with peer review by engineers from outside teams.

## Takeaways

- Post-mortems should provide educational, step-by-step investigation details, such as exact log queries and code context, to empower external engineers to debug future issues.
- Incident solutions and improvements must be systematically categorized into people, product, and process bottlenecks.
- Requiring engineers from another team to peer-review final post-mortems ensures adequate service context is included without personal bias.

**Tags:** [Architecture](https://yomu.fyi/topic/architecture), [Developer Experience](https://yomu.fyi/topic/developer-experience), [Incident Response](https://yomu.fyi/topic/incident-response), [Observability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/observability), [Reliability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/reliability)

[Read original post](https://engineering.grab.com/grab-you-some-post-mortem-reports)