Postmortem MockUp

This is the imaginary and quite possibly terrible failure we faced and managed to come out of unscathed due to the quick thinking of our talented employees. Here is detailed the postmortem (although nothing died) of our email server outage.
Issue Summary:

• Duration: The email server outage persisted from 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM on May 9th (UTC), spanning approximately 3.5 hours.

• Impact: All email communication services were disrupted, affecting every user during the outage period. This caused significant disruption to business operations.

• Root Cause: The outage resulted from a hardware failure within the storage array hosting the email server's data.

Timeline:

• Detection: Users reported email communication failure at 8:05 AM on May 9th, prompting immediate investigation.

• Actions Taken: Initial efforts focused on network connectivity and mail server software but shifted to infrastructure upon confirmation of no issues.

• Misleading Paths: False alerts indicating network disruptions initially diverted attention, delaying the identification of the underlying hardware issue.

• Escalation: The incident was escalated to the infrastructure team following confirmation of a hardware failure.

• Resolution: The faulty disk drive in the storage array was replaced, restoring email service by 11:30 AM.

Root Cause and Resolution:

• Root Cause: A malfunctioning disk drive within the storage array caused the outage.

• Resolution: The issue was resolved by replacing the faulty disk drive and conducting rigorous testing to ensure data integrity.

Corrective and Preventative Measures:

• Improvements/Fixes:

  1. Introduce redundancy and failover mechanisms in the storage infrastructure to mitigate future hardware failures.

  2. Enhance monitoring systems for early detection of hardware issues and preemptive alerts.

  3. Establish clear escalation procedures for critical infrastructure incidents.

• Tasks:

  1. Upgrade storage infrastructure to include redundancy and failover capabilities.

  2. Review and adjust monitoring configurations to incorporate health checks for storage components.

  3. Conduct training sessions for support staff on identifying and responding to hardware-related incidents.

  4. Develop a comprehensive incident response playbook outlining procedures for handling infrastructure failures.

This incident underscores the necessity of robust infrastructure resilience measures and proactive monitoring to maintain service availability. Implementation of outlined corrective actions aims to bolster email service reliability and minimize future disruptions.