Free template
A postmortem template your team will actually fill in.
Two free templates: a blameless postmortem for your team and a short incident report you can send to a client. Copy them as Markdown and use them in your own tools.
Internal postmortem
For your team, written within a few days of the incident. Focus on causes and improvements, not on who made a mistake.
# Postmortem: [short title of the incident]
**Date:** [date]
**Authors:** [names]
**Status:** draft / reviewed
## Summary
[Two or three sentences: what happened, how long it lasted and who was affected.]
## Impact
- Affected sites or services: [ ]
- Duration: [start] to [end] ([total minutes])
- Users or clients affected: [ ]
- Data loss: yes / no
## Timeline
| Time | Event |
|------|-------|
| [hh:mm] | First alert |
| [hh:mm] | Incident acknowledged |
| [hh:mm] | Cause identified |
| [hh:mm] | Fix deployed |
| [hh:mm] | Service fully restored |
## Root cause
[What caused the incident? Ask why until you reach a cause you can fix.]
## Detection
[How did we find out? Could we have known sooner?]
## Resolution
[What did we do to restore the service?]
## What went well
- [ ]
## What went wrong
- [ ]
## Action items
| Action | Owner | Due date |
|--------|-------|----------|
| [ ] | [ ] | [ ] |
Incident report for a client
For agencies: a short, plain-language report you can send to a client after an outage of their site.
# Incident report: [site name]
**Date of incident:** [date]
**Duration:** [start] to [end]
## What happened
[One or two sentences in plain language, for example: "The checkout of your webshop showed an error for 18 minutes."]
## Impact for you
[What visitors or customers noticed, and whether any data or orders were affected.]
## What we did
[How the problem was found and fixed.]
## Cause
[The cause, without jargon.]
## What we do to prevent this
- [measure 1]
- [measure 2]
Questions? Contact [name] at [email or phone].
Keep it blameless
A postmortem is about the system, not the person. People hide mistakes when they expect blame, and then the same incident happens again.
Write it while it is fresh
Write the postmortem within a few days. A timeline built from alerts, deploy logs and chat messages is far more reliable than memory.
Every action item gets an owner
Action items without an owner and a due date are wishes. Keep the list short and follow up in your next team meeting.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a postmortem and an incident report?
A postmortem is an internal analysis of causes and improvements. An incident report informs others, such as a client, about what happened and what you did.
When should we write a postmortem?
After every incident that affected users, and after near misses that could have. Small incidents can share one short document.
How do I build an accurate timeline?
Start from your monitoring. nopanic keeps uptime checks, exceptions and status page updates in one timeline, so the facts are already in order.
All of this for every client site, in one place.
Monitoring, errors, debugging and security for every Laravel app you run. Hosted and processed in the EU.
