Postmortem investigation troubleshoots an application after it crashes and stops running. Traditional debugging is no longer available, so the investigation relies on evidence captured during or after the failure. section 1.1
The practical goal is to identify the crash’s root cause quickly enough to implement a fix and prevent another failure, especially when a production service has stopped. section 1.1
Collect and interpret evidence such as:
- Logs, which record application activity leading up to the failure. section 1.1
- Heap dumps, which provide a snapshot of application memory. section 1.1
- Thread dumps, which show the state of all threads at a particular moment. section 1.1
- Application output, when execution produces a useful result before stopping. section 1.1
Investigating a failed process through logs
A process fails after producing hundreds of thousands of log lines over several days. Filter for exceptions related to database locks, then group them by query or apparent calling method. An AI assistant can accelerate extraction and classification, but the findings still require investigation because some entries may be missed or misclassified. section 4.1
