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Platform & Infrastructure · Template

Incident post-mortem template

A blameless post-mortem you can fill in within an hour of an incident closing: timeline, impact, causes and owned follow-ups.

K
Kofi Asante Sample 22 Oct 2026
Incident response SRE

When to use it

Within two working days of any incident that paged someone or touched customers.

Rules

  • Blameless: describe systems and decisions, never people.
  • Every action item has one owner and a date.
  • Publish it where the whole engineering team can read it.

Sections

  1. Summary: two sentences a non-engineer understands.
  2. Impact: who was affected, for how long, what they couldn't do.
  3. Timeline (UTC): detection, escalation, mitigation, resolution.
  4. Root causes: the chain of conditions, not a single culprit.
  5. What went well, and where we got lucky.
  6. Action items: owner, date, ticket.