Skip to main content

Post-Mortem Template (Blameless)

Incident Summary​

  • Date: YYYY-MM-DD
  • Severity: SEV-X
  • Duration: HH:MM — HH:MM ([total])
  • Impact: [description of affected users/services]
  • Author: [name of person writing post-mortem]

Timeline​

Time (UTC)Event
HH:MMIncident detected / first alert fired
HH:MMOn-call engineer acknowledges
HH:MMWar room created
HH:MMMitigation applied (rollback, failover, etc.)
HH:MMService restored to normal
HH:MMIncident closed

Root Cause​

What happened: [technical description of the underlying cause]

Why it wasn't prevented: [gap in controls that allowed this to happen]

Contributing Factors​

  • [factor 1 — e.g., missing alert on metric X]
  • [factor 2 — e.g., insufficient redundancy]
  • [factor 3 — e.g., documentation gap]

Impact Assessment​

  • Users affected: [count or percentage]
  • Data loss: [yes/no, amount if yes]
  • SLA impact: [any SLA breach]
  • Customer notifications sent: [yes/no, count]

Action Items​

IDActionOwnerDue DateStatus
AI-001[specific, actionable task][name]YYYY-MM-DDOpen
AI-002[specific, actionable task][name]YYYY-MM-DDOpen

What Went Well​

  • [positive observation 1]
  • [positive observation 2]

Lessons Learned​

  • [key takeaway 1]
  • [key takeaway 2]

Sign-off​

NameTitleDate
Engineering Manager
CTO