Post-Mortem Template
Security SpecialistOperations & StrategyDevops
Complete this after significant incidents (P1-P3). Focus on learning, not blame.
How to Use
- Copy this template to Post-Mortems folder
- Scribe creates draft before the post-mortem meeting
- Hold meeting within a week of resolution
- All responders contribute
- Every post-mortem produces action items with owners and deadlines
- Share with team (and publicly if appropriate)
Post-Mortem:
INCIDENT TITLE
Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Incident Date | YYYY-MM-DD |
| Severity | P1 / P2 / P3 |
| Authors | |
| Status | Draft / Final |
| Incident Log | Link to incident log |
Summary
[2-4 paragraphs. What happened, when, how long, how it was resolved. Someone unfamiliar should understand the incident after reading this.]
Impact
Users
- Users affected:
- Duration:
- Services unavailable:
Financial
- Funds at risk:
- Actual losses:
Reputation
- Public visibility:
- Media coverage:
Timeline
| Time (UTC) | Event |
|---|---|
| Incident began | |
| Detected | |
| Response started | |
| Root cause identified | |
| Mitigation applied | |
| Resolved |
See linked Incident Log for detailed timeline.
Root Cause
Primary Cause
[What was the fundamental reason this happened?]
Contributing Factors
5 Whys
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Why did [incident] happen? | |
| Why? | |
| Why? | |
| Why? | |
| Why? |
What Went Well
What Went Wrong
Where We Got Lucky
[What fortunate circumstances helped that we shouldn't rely on next time?]
Action Items
Every action item needs an owner and deadline.
| Action | Owner | Deadline | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Lessons for Runbooks
Should we create or update a runbook based on this incident?
- New runbook needed: [type]
- Existing runbook to update: [which one]
- No runbook changes needed
Detection
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| How detected | Monitoring / User report / Team member / Other |
| Time to detection | |
| Could we detect faster? |
Links
- Incident Log: [Link to incident log]
- Relevant PRs:
- Dashboards:
- External references:
Meeting Notes
Attendees:Discussion points:Template based on Incident-Response-Policy