Word Cloud — Contributing Factors Across 38 Incident Post-Mortems
Contributing factors tagged in 38 blameless post-mortems for an online retailer's platform over 2025: 137 tags, with "config change" (17) and "missing alert" (15) the most common. Most incidents carry three or more factors — the cloud is a prompt for the reliability review, not a root cause. Illustrative values.
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title "Contributing factors — 38 post-mortems, 2025 (illustrative)"
# Weight = post-mortems tagging the factor (137 tags; an incident usually has several).
"config change" 17
"missing alert" 15
"unclear runbook" 13
"capacity limit" 12
"retry storm" 10
"expired certificate" 7
"dependency upgrade" 9
"manual step" 11
"feature flag" 8
"database migration" 8
DNS 5
"third-party outage" 6
"noisy neighbour" 4
"clock skew" 3
"cache stampede" 5
"rollback failed" 4