What is a pre-mortem?
A pre-mortem is the opposite of a post-mortem: instead of asking “what went wrong?” after an incident, it asks “what could go wrong?” before a deployment. sureops generates one for each PR that touches services in your environment. Each pre-mortem includes:- An overall risk score (0–10)
- A list of risk factors — specific concerns about the change and the services it touches
- Affected services — which services in your landscape could be impacted
- Similar past incidents — historical incidents whose root causes resemble patterns in this diff
- A recommendation — whether to proceed, proceed with caution, or escalate for further review before merging
The Pre-mortems list
Navigate to Pre-mortems in the sidebar to see all recent pre-mortem assessments. The list is organized with the three highest-risk PRs pinned at the top when no filters are active — these are the changes most likely to cause an incident and deserve attention before they merge. Below the pinned rows, the full list appears newest first.Filters
Use the filter bar to narrow the list:- Repository — filter by the GitHub repo the PR belongs to
- Status — Pending (assessment in progress), Posted (assessment complete), or Failed (agent could not complete the assessment)
- Minimum risk score — a slider from 0–10; drag it up to show only high-risk PRs
Pre-mortem statuses
Reading a pre-mortem report
Click any row to open the pre-mortem detail page for that PR.Risk score
The risk score is a 0–10 number computed from the combination of risk factors. Use it as a signal, not a gate:Risk factors
Each risk factor is a specific concern about the change, such as:- “This diff modifies the payment-service database migration path — past incidents show this is a high-blast-radius change”
- “The changed function handles retry logic; similar retry-loop patterns appeared in 3 past incidents”
- “Service has no runbook coverage for the error path this change introduces”