A building management system (BMS) lets your business monitor and control mechanical and electrical equipment across one or more buildings. Heating, cooling, and ventilation (HVAC), security, and other systems linked to a BMS usually represent 70% of a building’s energy usage. So, proper configuration of your BMS is key — otherwise, a poorly configured system can negatively impact your building’s efficiency, maintenance, security, and safety.

To put it bluntly, did someone die? In engineering, let’s hope your answer is a resounding no. So why do we continue to use the word ‘postmortem’?

The most essential lesson of SRE is that failure is inevitable. This shouldn’t be a cause for despair. SRE shows how embracing failure is empowering. By celebrating failure, you can accelerate development and foster a culture of learning. Rather than hoping to prevent failure, SRE prepares you to respond well to it. It can be difficult, if not impossible, to anticipate where failure will occur in complex systems given unknown unknowns.

In the present fast-moving digital world, it has become critical for businesses to measure and track their service delivery performance especially the incident management metrics that monitor the uptime of systems, downtime due to outages, and how fast and efficiently issues are resolved because even a slight glitch in the system can cause disruption in the business processes costing millions of dollars.

It’s been almost a year since the world changed overnight and industries across the world quickly adapted to living, working, and learning fully virtually. While the world seemed to stop in an instant, many businesses saw an increase in demand and new challenges. PagerDuty was no different.

January 4th, 2021, the communication service Slack suffered a major outage. Teams working remotely found their primary communication method unavailable. The incident lasted over 4 hours, during which some customers had intermittent or delayed service, and others had no service at all. It was a reminder that even the most established tools are susceptible to downtime. This is a core lesson of SRE: that failure is inevitable.

Successful and blameless postmortems can turn incidents into a gift of learning and prevent repeat mistakes.