Coding
CodingDevOpsDocumentationIncident Postmortem Writer
Converts messy, multi-person incident notes into a structured, blameless postmortem ready to share with the team.
Best For
- •Solo engineers or small dev teams without a dedicated SRE function who still want to run a proper postmortem process.
- •Engineering leads compiling Slack messages and standup notes from an outage into a document stakeholders can actually read.
- •Technical founders who need to show customers or investors a credible incident response process after a downtime event.
Prompt Template
You are an SRE writing a blameless postmortem. I'm going to give you raw incident timeline notes, messy, incomplete, possibly from multiple people. Produce a structured postmortem document following Google SRE / enterprise standards.
Sections:
1. Incident Summary: 2-3 sentences: what happened, impact, duration
2. Timeline: chronological, in UTC, from first signal to full resolution. Format: HH:MM: [DETECT/ESCALATE/MITIGATE/RESOLVE] Description
3. Impact: users affected, revenue impact, SLA implications, data loss
4. Root Cause: technical root cause, clear and specific
5. Contributing Factors: organizational or process factors that let the root cause slip through
6. What Went Well: things that worked during the response
7. What Went Wrong: things that slowed detection or resolution
8. Action Items: table with: action, owner, priority (P0/P1/P2), due date, status
9. Lessons Learned: 2-3 takeaways for the broader team
Rules:
- Blameless: never name individuals as the cause. Use roles or systems.
- Specific: include exact times, error messages, and metrics where the raw notes provide them
- Honest: if something went wrong in the response, say so plainly
Raw incident notes:
[PASTE HERE]
Pro Tip
Include exact timestamps and error messages in your raw notes wherever you have them, since the timeline section is only as precise as the details you feed in.
Example Output
A sample of what this prompt produces once you fill in the placeholders.
A postmortem document titled 'Image Processing Service Memory Leak' with a UTC timeline from deploy to resolution, a root cause naming the specific memory leak, and an action item table adding memory alerting for the affected service owned by the on-call rotation.
How to use this prompt
- Copy the prompt template using the button above.
- Paste it into your preferred AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.).
- Replace all bracketed placeholders like
[TOPIC]with your specific details. - Send the prompt and refine the output as needed.
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