After every incident you have the opportunity to learn, improve, and build trust with customers by closing the loop with a postmortem.
You’ve just resolved an incident – congrats! High-fives and #HugOps all around.
It can be tempting to call it a day after you transition your status to “resolved,” but your work isn’t done, yet…
After every incident you have a unique opportunity to learn, improve, and build trust with customers by closing the loop with a postmortem that lets affected users know what happened, how you fixed it, and what you’re doing to make sure the same issue doesn’t happen again.
We’ve always given you the ability to write and publish postmortems to your status page after an incident is resolved, but it was difficult to work with other teammates on a draft and hard to format – especially if you weren’t comfortable with markdown.
Today, we’re excited to announce some fresh new updates that will make it easier to write a perfect postmortem every time.
Autosaved drafts make it easier to collaborate
Being tasked with writing a postmortem can be pretty daunting. You want to give meaningful and accurate information to your customers, while delivering a tone that shows empathy and matches the severity of the situation. Getting it just right usually requires input from teams all across your organization. Devs or SREs provide technical details, support and PR can help shape the tone, and legal may need to get involved for any security-related incidents.
Our old postmortem feature required you to save each draft before you passed it off to another person to edit, making it hard to collaborate on the message.
The new Statuspage postmortem feature autosaves your draft with every update, making it easy to circulate among various stakeholders for creation, review, and approval.
Formatting made simple
We’ve also baked in a new editor that lets you create postmortem content in a more beautiful and easy-to-read format. You can now insert content including text, links, and tables, and adjust format using the toolbar – no markdown needed!
If markdown’s your jam, have no fear – you can still write in markdown in this editor.
Notify subscribers with one click
Keeping customers out of the dark during an incident is essential, but how you close the loop with affected users after an incident is equally as important. Once you’re happy with your postmortem draft, you can publish it to your status page and choose whether you want to send an email to subscribers with the postmortem update.
If you have the Twitter integration enabled, you can also send out a tweet linking to your postmortem.
Here’s what a typical postmortem email notification will look like:
Get started
This new postmortem feature is now enabled for all Statuspage customers. To get started, head to the incidents tab of your dashboard, click into the incident you want to write a postmortem for, and draft away!
We love hearing from you, so tell us how it goes @Statuspage.
And for a deeper dive into how Statuspage postmortems work, head over to our knowledge base article.
If you’re not a Statuspage customer and would like to test the feature out for yourself, click here for a free trial!