Post-Incident Review and Prevention

Review purpose

Recovery is not the same as prevention. After a SophMate incident, the team should identify what failed, what was detected late, what evidence was missing, which safeguards worked, and which workflow or documentation needs to change before normal operation expands.

Prevention actions

Assign owners for prompt changes, permission updates, source corrections, provider fallback changes, rate-limit adjustments, test-data cleanup, or additional evaluations. Pair this with Incident Response Runbook, Model Evaluation and Regression Review, and Audit Log Review.

Restart decision

Do not restart paused automation only because the immediate symptom stopped. Confirm preventive actions, documentation updates, alert tuning, and responsible owners before returning workflows, agents, or customer-facing panels to normal scope.

Owner and cadence

• Primary owner: support lead or site administrator responsible for triage and evidence handling.
• Review cadence: when an issue is reported, before support contact, and after recovery to improve the runbook.
• Escalate when incidents are closed without root-cause notes, prevention owners, regression checks, or restart criteria.

Production checklist

• Record root cause, detection gaps, missing evidence, safeguards that worked, and safeguards that failed.
• Assign prevention owners for prompt updates, permission changes, source corrections, provider settings, rate limits, tests, or alert tuning.
• Capture exact timestamp, affected user, affected screen, SophMate version, WordPress version, PHP version, and reproduction steps.
• Redact provider keys, credentials, payment data, private customer details, and raw logs before support handoff.

Acceptance checks

• Paused workflows, agents, tools, or panels restart only after prevention actions and regression checks are complete.
• The incident produces a documented change to runbooks, sources, prompts, tests, permissions, or monitoring.
• The support report lets another operator reproduce or triage the issue without receiving secrets.
• The team knows whether to escalate to hosting, provider support, CodeCanyon support, or internal operations.

Common mistakes

• Closing an incident after recovery without assigning preventive changes, regression checks, source fixes, or restart criteria.
• Retrying or changing settings repeatedly before preserving the exact error report, timestamp, and affected screen.
• Opening support requests with raw logs or vague descriptions instead of redacted diagnostics and reproduction steps.

Related operations

• Start with Incident Response Runbook.
• Add regression coverage with Model Evaluation and Regression Review.
• Use Incident Response Runbook when production behavior is affected.
• Use Contacting Support before opening a support request.
• Use Support SLA and Escalation Matrix before customer-visible support routing.
• Use Error Reports and Support Codes before redacting or sharing an error report.
• Use Migration and Reindex Review before restarting workflows after updates.
• Use Post-Incident Review and Prevention before returning paused work to normal scope.
• Use Changelog and Release Note Review before release decisions.