Incident Postmortem Writer
By Cameron Chen · Published · Updated
Writes a blameless postmortem covering impact, a clear timeline, root cause, what worked and actions with owners and dates, ready to share with the wider team.
Tags: devops, communication
Prompt template
## Incident Postmortem Writer Write a blameless postmortem for this incident. - Incident summary: [textarea: What broke and how it was noticed] - Timeline notes: [textarea: Times and events from chat or logs in any order] - Customer impact: [textarea: Who was affected and for how long and what they saw] - Severity: [dropdown: Sev 1, Sev 2, Sev 3, Near miss] - What the team found: [textarea: Cause as best understood and how it was fixed] - Audience: [dropdown: Engineering only, Whole company, Customers] Open with a three-sentence summary a busy executive can stop reading after. Quantify impact with duration, users, failed requests or money where known, and mark estimates as estimates. Build a timeline in order with times in one time zone, separating detection, response and recovery, and call out the gaps, such as minutes between the alert and the first human reply. For root cause, ask why five times and stop at a systemic cause in process, tooling or design, never at a person: write "the deploy had no canary" rather than naming who deployed. Include a section on what went well so those habits are kept. List contributing factors separately from the root cause. End with actions, each with an owner, a due date, a type (prevent, detect or mitigate) and a way to tell it is done. Keep the tone factual and adjust the detail for the audience.