After a three-hour outage caused by a misconfigured database firewall rule, leadership asks how the team should run the post-incident review. What approach best prevents recurrence?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: B
A blameless postmortem treats the incident as a symptom of system conditions. It looks at why the change passed without checks, why the procedure allowed it, and how detection could be faster, then assigns follow-up actions to those gaps. This keeps people willing to report problems. Naming an individual discourages candor, skipping documentation loses lessons, and tightening approval without analysis may not fix the real gap.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Assigning personal fault tends to hide information, because people stop volunteering details. The same validation gap remains and could cause another outage.
- C. Restoring service is necessary, but without a write-up the organization gains no learning and the same firewall mistake can recur in future changes.
- D. Single-approver gating adds a bottleneck without addressing why the faulty rule was not caught, and it does not examine the process that allowed the error.