Kick off your postmortem analysis with a high-level summary of the incident’s duration, causes, and effects. Make sure to highlight which services and customers were affected. This helps your team understand how the incident affected the system and provides context as your team prepares for a thorough analysis.

Now that you’ve provided an incident summary, you’re ready to dive into the details. Incidents are an opportunity for your engineering team to learn from past mistakes. Our template is designed for your team to identify an incident’s root cause without placing blame on any individual member. By conducting your incident analysis in a constructive and collaborative manner, your team can focus on brainstorming solutions.

As your team works together to analyze the incident, use the template to note their insights and open questions. Follow through on your team’s analysis by using their recommendations to prevent the incident from happening again. Once you make an incident postmortem plan, keep track of your progress by creating and updating Jira tickets.