Template
Incident postmortem template.
A blameless framework for documenting incidents, finding root cause, and preventing recurrence with actionable follow‑ups.
Template sections
What to capture
- Incident summary with impact, duration, and severity.
- Timeline of key events: detection, mitigation, recovery.
- Root cause analysis (5 Whys / fishbone) and contributing factors.
- Customer and stakeholder communications.
- Action items with owners, dates, and verification steps.
Good practices
Run effective postmortems
- Keep tone blameless; focus on systems and guardrails.
- Automate data collection: logs, dashboards, and alerts.
- Track actions to completion and verify with tests or playbooks.
- Share learnings broadly to prevent similar incidents.