how to write an incident report

Sat Oct 20 19:24:24 UTC 2007

On 20-Oct-2007, at 1304, Hank Nussbacher wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Joe Abley wrote:
>
>> For those who don't recognise the name (presumably many people),  
>> Citylink are a disruptive high-speed metro transport provider in  
>> Wellington, New Zealand. They run the most elaborate and scary  
>> layer-2 switched ethernet network I've ever heard of, and the  
>> other week they ran into some problems which caused a prolonged  
>> outage.
>>
>> Here's their writeup:
>>
>> http://news.clnz.net/2007/10/19#Loopback-Saturday-Discussion
>>
>> Why don't I have any suppliers like this?
>
> Probably because your suppliers run everything thru their lawyers.

I've had a few responses like this, but I don't buy it. I've worked  
in many places, some in New Zealand and more elsewhere, where there  
was a general culture of fear about making public statements about  
operational incidents. I don't ever remember people sending proposed  
text to legal and having it pushed back with changes; what happened  
instead was that text wasn't written in the first place.

Maybe Simon's level of detail is such that no legal department would  
ever condone it. But there's such a tremendous distance between  
Simon's text and the usual "there are no known issues at this time"  
that I suspect people just aren't trying.

Joe