Incident reviews may describe how a software team investigated a problem, restored service, and changed its practices. A company can explain those record categories in an initial licensing conversation without sending incident reports. Relevance, permissions, security concerns and any proposed terms still require separate review.
- Distinguish the postmortem, its supporting evidence, and the follow-up record.
- A public status update and an internal incident review are different scopes.
- Describe closed operational incidents at company level; keep raw logs and sensitive details in your systems.
What an incident review can explain
An incident record can preserve the sequence between noticing a problem and changing the way a service runs. The summary may connect an impact, a timeline, mitigation decisions, contributing causes, and follow-up work.
Google's SRE guidance describes postmortems as a way to document incidents and prevent recurrence, with an emphasis on learning. That is the operational purpose of the record. Considering a later licensing use is a separate question, not the reason to invent or expand an incident report.
Source: Google SRE: postmortem culture
A fictional service incident
Imagine a software company's background queue slows after a configuration change. The team notes the detection time, tests two explanations, reverses the setting, and later adds a capacity check. A follow-up review records which action was completed and which remains open.
This example is invented. It shows how the reasoning and outcome could be described without exposing hostnames, private endpoints, log excerpts, customer identities, or the exact configuration.
| Layer | Describe at company level | Review separately |
|---|---|---|
| Timeline | Whether detection, investigation and restoration stages remain linked | Detailed infrastructure and raw event logs |
| Decision history | Whether alternatives and mitigation choices were recorded | Internal conversations and individual identifiers |
| Postmortem | The categories covered by the final review | Customer impact and confidential findings |
| Follow-up | Whether actions have recorded owners and completion states | Unresolved weaknesses and private security work |
A public update is not the whole incident record
A status-page update may describe the customer-facing outcome. The internal review may contain evidence, uncertainty, discussion, or later corrections that were never published. Record those as different categories rather than assuming one can substitute for the other.
The fact that some text is publicly accessible does not settle whether an expanded collection can be licensed. Start by identifying authors, sources, applicable agreements and the exact proposed use. Keep externally supplied material distinct from your team's own account.
Leave sensitive detail out of the first conversation
An initial business overview should not contain vulnerability instructions, active incident details, customer records, credentials, network diagrams or raw logs. A security incident may require a different review from a closed reliability incident; do not silently combine them.
Ask your security and operational owners whether any category should be excluded from exploration entirely. An exclusion is a scope decision, not proof that everything left behind is cleared. Origin's first conversation can stay with category names, retained history and open questions.
Inventory the learning loop
Choose a closed incident type and identify whether the original issue, the review and the follow-up can still be connected. Note changes in reporting templates, gaps from a system migration, and cases where the final action has no recorded outcome.
A useful company-level description might say: “We retain reliability reviews and some linked follow-up tickets. The retention period varies by system, and security-sensitive material is outside the discussion.” This is a fictional description, not a statement about a current supplier.
Use the workflow map to organize the categories, then frame a first conversation. A useful overview does not need the report itself.
Common questions
Are public postmortems automatically available for AI training?
Do not assume that publication authorizes every later use or redistribution. Identify the applicable terms and sources, and review the proposed use before making a licensing claim.
Can we discuss reliability reviews while excluding security incidents?
You can define those as different categories in a company overview. Your responsible teams should confirm the boundary; a potential recipient would separately evaluate any proposed scope.
Do old incidents still matter if the product has changed?
Describe the period, product context and what has changed. An older record is neither automatically useful nor automatically irrelevant. No licensing value follows simply from its age.