Create a postmortem

What to write

Once you've resolved an incident, it's always good to write a postmortem (especially for major outages). Postmortems are your opportunity to tell your customers what went wrong and what you're doing to avoid the incident in the future. Whether or not you should write a postmortem really depends on a combination of how important your product is to your customers and how severe the incident was.

To write a successful postmortem, you should do three things:

  1. Apologize

  2. Show understanding of what happened

  3. Explain your remediation plan

Create a postmortem

Postmortems can only be created once you resolve an incident.

  1. Click the Incidents tab on the incidents page.

  2. Select Write postmortem on the Incidents page next to a resolved incident.

  3. Type up your postmortem report in the text field. While writing your content, drafts are automatically saved so that you can review content before posting.

  4. Click Publish when you're satisfied with your draft.

Postmortems are created using our editor, which has some support for Github Flavored Markdown (GFM) style syntax. GFM is an extended version of basic markdown syntax.

Shows the form to fill out in order to create a postmortem

Here's what a published postmortem looks like:

Shows a published postmortem with styled text

Opinionated styling

We have set a default size and margin that we believe works really well and results in an easy-to-read postmortem.

Override these styles

As always, you can override the styles that affect your postmortems by using the Custom CSS feature.

Additional Help