oxbshw Incident Postmortem
When to use
- After an incident with customer impact
- After a near-miss worth documenting
- For drills / GameDay exercises
When NOT to use
- Live incidents (use
incident-runbookinstead) - Pure private learnings (use a personal log)
Inputs
| Name | Type | Required | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
timeline |
text or paths | yes | Source notes, alert links, chat extracts |
severity |
S0–S3 |
yes | Severity at peak |
incident_id |
string | yes | e.g. INC-2026-04-12-001 |
Outputs
postmortem.md with: Summary, Impact, Timeline, Direct cause, Contributing factors, What went well, What didn't, Action items.
Workflow
- Reconstruct the timeline (UTC), one row per notable event
- State impact in user-facing terms (requests failed, dollars lost, customers affected)
- Identify the direct cause in one sentence — what specifically broke
- List contributing factors (the conditions that made the incident possible / hard to mitigate)
- Separate what went well (genuine wins, not platitudes) and what didn't
- Owners + dates on every action item; hard fail if missing
- Tone: blameless. Describe systems failing, not people.
References
references/postmortem-template.md
Success criteria
- Every action item has an owner and a date
- Direct cause is one sentence
- No names attached to fault; only roles / systems
- Timeline times in UTC
Failure modes
- Missing source data → list gaps explicitly; don't fill with guesses
- Conflicting timelines → record both, flag for review