Create a postmortem report

A postmortem is a written record of an incident that contains information such as incident impact, mitigation steps, root cause, and follow-up actions.

The goal of a postmortem is to understand all root causes, document the incident for future reference, discover patterns, and enact effective preventative actions to reduce the impact or likelihood of recurrence. Learn how we do postmortems at Atlassian.

Prerequisites

• You must be on an enterprise plan to access incidents and postmortems.

• You must mark the incident as resolved or closed to conduct the postmortem.

Postmortems can be created and accessed from two places:

• Incident details page

• Analytics page

Create a postmortem from the incident details

Steps

1. Go to Incidents and select an incident.

2. Once you mark an incident as resolved or closed, a new section called Postmortems appears in the incident view.

3. Click Create postmortem to create and open the postmortem template.

4. The template is pre-populated with a recommended layout but you are free to compose the postmortem using any structure you like. Some fields can’t be edited such as ICC session and Incident duration, which is determined by the incident start and end time.

Outcome
You can consult the list of created postmortems by going to Analytics > Postmortems.

Create a postmortem from the reports section

Steps

1. Go to Incidents and select an incident.

2. Change its status to resolved.

3. Go to Analytics > Postmortems and click Create postmortem.

4. Select the incident you want to associate to the postmortem.

5. Select Create to see the postmortem template. The template is pre-populated with a recommended layout but you are free to compose the postmortem using any structure you like. Some fields can’t be edited such as ICC session and Incident duration, which is determined by the incident start and end time.

Outcome
You can consult the list of created postmortems by going to Analytics > Postmortems.

Sections available in postmortems:

Executive summary: A brief summary of the incident and its resolution process.
Details: Details of the incident, prefilled with the incident data.
Timeline: Timeline of the incident which includes all of the key events about the incidents and the response process. Please note that any update made on the timeline in the postmortem will not be reflected to the actual incident timeline available in the incident details and command center sessions.
Key points section: Includes the sections that you can capture the key points of the incident, such as incident's impact, actions taken to mitigate or resolve the incident, and the root cause. These sections can be modified fully according to your needs since it is provided as a rich text editor.
Attachments: Attachments that are attached to the postmortem. The generated incident report is added as a default attachment.
Related Incidents: Other incidents that are related to the incident that the postmortem is created for.
Jira Software issues: Linked issues that are created in Jira as follow-up tasks. Before you can use the issue linking feature within postmortems you need to do the following:

1. Confirm that your Opsgenie account is under an Atlassian site: Your Opsgenie account should be under an Atlassian site. If your account does not have an Atlassian site, you need to migrate your account first. During migration, make sure you’re selecting the Atlassian site that is connected to your Jira Software account.
You can go to your account settings to initiate the migration process. You can learn more about migrating to an Atlassian site and what it means for you here.

2. Your Jira Software account needs to be under the same Atlassian site as your Opsgenie account: Confirm that your Jira Software account is under the same Atlassian site as your Opsgenie account, otherwise you won’t be able to use the issue linking functionality.
Once your Opsgenie account is migrated to the same Atlassian site as your Jira Software Cloud account, your account will automatically be connected with Jira Software Cloud and you will be able to link issues within postmortems.

Postmortem requirements

Postmortems can be required or skipped. By default, all of the incidents have their postmortem required field set as true, but this can be edited from the incident details page.

1. Go to Details tab of the incident.

2. Change Postmortem Required field via the button available next to the field.

3. When the field is set as false, Postmortem Status and Publish Due Date fields will be invisible. When the field is set as true, Postmortem Status and Publish Due Date fields will be visible and the due date can be edited as needed.

When the incident is resolved or closed, the requirement settings can also be changed from the Postmortem tab available in incident details view.

1. Navigate to Postmortem tab within the incident details.

2. Change the requirement setting from the button available at the bottom.

3. When requiring postmortem, an option to set a publish due date will be shown in the pop-up.

Searching for incidents with postmortem related fields

Incidents can be searched based on their postmortem related fields, by using the search query available in the Incidents page. The available fields for search are:

• postmortemPublishDueDate (Epoch timestamp or ISO 8061 date format)


• postmortemRequired (boolean)


• postmortemStatus (no-postmortem, published, in-review, draft)


Examples:

• postmortemPublishDueDate < '2019-07-24T00:00:00+00:00'

• postmortemStatus: published

• postmortemRequired: true AND postmortemStatus: 'no-postmortem'

Exporting postmortems to Confluence

To export your postmortems to Confluence:

1. Navigate to the ellipsis button available on the top-right corner of the postmortem.

2. Click Export to Confluence.

3. Define the Confluence Space and the Parent Page to export your postmortem to. You can also change the title of the page if needed.

4. Click Export.



Incident Timeline app for Confluence

Opsgenie provides an app in Confluence to display the incident timeline in the exported postmortem. The app also lets you edit and take actions on the timeline such as filter selections. This app is installed in your Confluence account by default.