Post-Incident Analysis
Trace the blast radius of what broke.
After an incident, you need to understand why one failure cascaded — and whether it can happen again. Axiom Refract gives your postmortem structural evidence instead of educated guesses.
After the incident
The fire is out. Now comes the harder question: why did a single failure take down parts of the system nobody expected it to reach?
One File Took Down Three Services
The incident started in a single module. Within minutes, three services were degraded. The postmortem reveals a dependency chain nobody knew existed — a transitive import path running through a shared utility.
The Root Cause Wasn't the Trigger
The alert fired on Service B. The bug was in Service A. The actual root cause was a single point of failure sitting between them that amplified a minor error into a cascading failure. Finding that chain took the team two days.
Postmortems Without Structural Evidence
The team writes “improve monitoring” and “add more tests” in the action items. But nobody can explain the structural reason the failure propagated the way it did. The next incident follows the same hidden dependency chain.
Recurrence Despite Fixes
You fixed the immediate bug. Six weeks later, a similar incident occurs through a different dependency path to the same SPOF. The underlying structural vulnerability was never identified, only the symptom.
How Axiom Refract strengthens your postmortem
Move from “we think it happened because” to “the dependency graph proves it.” Structural evidence for every finding.
Blast Radius of the Failed Component
Point Axiom at the file or module that failed. It calculates the complete blast radius — every downstream dependent, every upstream dependency, and every architectural zone affected. You see exactly how wide the damage could spread.
Dependency Chain That Propagated the Failure
Trace the exact path the failure took through your system. Axiom's dependency graph shows the import chain from the origin point through every intermediate file to every affected endpoint. No more guessing how Service A broke Service C.
SPOF Identification to Prevent Recurrence
The incident exposed a structural vulnerability. Axiom identifies every single point of failure in the affected zones — files with high centrality, excessive dependents, and no redundancy. Fix the SPOF, not just the bug.
Structural Evidence for Postmortems
Replace “we think it propagated through X” with a dependency graph that proves it. Axiom provides exportable structural evidence — centrality scores, blast radius calculations, and zone impact maps — that make postmortem analysis rigorous.
Vulnerability Pattern Detection
Once you see the structural pattern that enabled this incident, scan the rest of the codebase for the same pattern. Axiom's SPOF detection and centrality analysis reveal every other place where a similar failure could cascade.
Understand why one failure took down your system — and prevent the next one.
Don't let your next postmortem end with “add more tests.” Find the structural vulnerabilities that enabled the cascade, and fix them at the architectural level.