Overview
On 5th February 2023 at about 10pm, our web application experienced an outage that lasted for 6hours. During this time, users were unable to access the application and experienced errors when attempting to do so. This report outlines the cause of the outage, the steps taken to mitigate the issue, and the measures that will be put in place to prevent similar incidents in the future.
Cause
The outage was caused by a misconfiguration in the Nginx server that prevented the application from being served.
Mitigation
Upon identifying the issue, the development team took the following steps to mitigate the outage:
• Config files Review and Update: We reviewed the Nginx configuration files and identified the misconfiguration that was preventing the application from being served.
• We corrected the misconfiguration and restarted the Nginx server.
• We monitored the server to ensure that the application was being served correctly.
As a result of these measures, the application was restored to its normal state and users were able to access it once again.
Preventive Measures
In order to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future, the following measures will be put in place:
• We will conduct a thorough review of our Nginx configuration files to ensure that they are correctly set up and are not susceptible to misconfigurations.
• We will implement monitoring tools that will notify us of any errors or anomalies in the Nginx server configuration, allowing us to proactively address any issues that may arise.
• We will provide additional training to our team members on best practices for configuring and managing Nginx servers.
These measures are designed to mitigate the risk of future outages and ensure the continued reliability and availability of the web application.
Conclusion
While the outage was an unfortunate incident, it provided an opportunity to identify weaknesses in our web development process and improve our practices going forward. By implementing the preventive measures outlined above, we are confident that we can minimize the risk of future outages and provide a more reliable and robust service to our users.
Action Items
The following action items will be completed as a result of this postmortem:
• We will conduct a thorough review of our Nginx configuration files to ensure that they are correctly set up and are not susceptible to misconfigurations.
• We will implement monitoring tools that will notify us of any errors or anomalies in the Nginx server configuration, allowing us to proactively address any issues that may arise.
• We will provide additional training to our team members on best practices for configuring and managing Nginx servers.
These action items will ensure that the preventive measures are implemented and that the risk of future outages is minimized.