Post-mortems

Why you need it

An incident closes; the work of explaining it begins. A post-mortem is the document procurement archives, the team lead reads with coffee, and "have we seen this before?" search hits six months later — and the public archive becomes its own quiet sales motion.

• Six structured sections, no blank-page paralysis. Summary, Impact, Timeline, Root cause, Remediation, Follow-ups. Each its own Markdown box — fill what you have, leave the rest for the next draft.
• Draft for as long as you need. Save half a document, sleep on the root cause, come back tomorrow. Nothing goes public until you click Publish.
• Subscriber broadcast on publish. Opted-in Email / Slack / Teams / SMS subscribers get the link exactly once. Follow-up edits don't re-broadcast — readers already have the URL.
• Public archive that sells for you. A searchable trail of recent post-mortems at /incidents/<id>/postmortem tells prospects you operate like a grown-up — without you saying a word in a pitch.
• Editable forever. Root cause is an evolving document; subsequent edits refine the record without spamming subscribers.

Where it pays off

The right answer when an incident is significant enough to warrant a written record:

• Major customer-impacting outages. Anything that put the public banner red for more than a few minutes deserves one — and your customers are already wondering whether you'll write it.
• Repeat incidents. Third time the database failover wedged. Writing it down forces "what changes so this is the last time" into a list of follow-ups with owners.
• Compliance and procurement asks. Security questionnaires routinely ask for a recent post-mortem. Having three on the public archive deflects the request entirely.
• Institutional learning. Even without publishing, the draft becomes the searchable record your next engineer reads when the symptom looks familiar.

Not the right tool when: the incident was a flap that resolved in under five minutes with no real impact — a one-line internal note serves better than a six-section ceremony.

Related

• Manual incidents
• AI incident drafts
• Incidents & alerts
• Status pages