After a high severity incident, it's good practice to spend some time documenting what you've learned and how you can stop this kind of incident from happening again. This usually takes the form of a post-mortem document.
You can either write this:
Within incident.io itself (and export a copy to your document provider like Google Docs or Confluence later)
Directly in your document provider
✏️ Writing within incident.io
To write your post-mortem, head to the Post-incident tab on the incident homepage and click Create post-mortem.
You'll then be prompted to select a post-mortem template. Provided that you select one which is configured to be written within incident.io (more on this later!), we'll render the template you selected and mark the post-mortem as In progress:
Most post-mortem templates include the incident summary, timeline and follow-ups so you'll notice these in the example above. You'll also notice two sections Impact assessment and Lessons learned which are custom sections that responders will need to fill out.
Clicking on one of these custom sections will show a few things:
Custom fields associated with the section. This encourages responders to check that important fields have been set correctly.
Help text. This highlights what responders should be thinking about when completing the section.
Template text. This is the starting text for the section, which can dictate the structure of the section. We'll interpolate any variables in the starting section, for example you might configure this text to include the name of the incident lead, and relevant timestamp values.
If you use one of our suggested post-mortem templates, we'll create sections with some sensible defaults for help text etc, but templates are entirely configurable so you can edit this as much as you like!
🌟 What's the benefit of this?
Data is in one place. If the post-mortem was written in an external system, data would be duplicated which means that updates to the incident summary, metadata or follow-ups wouldn't be reflected within incident.io, which has a knock on effect on other features like Insights or auto-export of follow-ups to an issue tracker.
Smarter AI suggestions. Ingesting post-mortem data can massively improve our AI suggestions in future incidents.
Richer experience. We can render data like the incident timeline much more effectively on the dashboard, making it easier for responders to get the "full picture" about what happened.
📁 What if I still want to export a copy?
You might want to do this for archival purposes; exporting a copy of the completed post-mortem to your knowledge base like Confluence or Notion can be helpful for search ability in the future.
To do this, just hit Export at the top of a post-mortem which was written in-house and choose your destination. All the sections on the post-mortem will be moved into the external document, but we'll still show the follow-ups and timeline on the post-incident tab.
⚙️ So how can I get set up?
Head to Settings → Post-mortems and click Edit on the post-mortem template you want to be written within incident.io. Make sure to select the option to write within incident.io.
Pro tip: if you want to check out the in-house writing experience before making the change, hit Add template and duplicate your existing template first!
📋 How does this work with the post-incident flow?
If you want incidents which enter your post-incident flow to use this template when writing a post-mortem, you'll probably also want to update the tasks in your post-incident flow. If you:
Only want post-mortems to be written in-house and never externally, replace your
Export the post-mortemtask with theDraft the post-mortemtask. This task will get checked off automatically when the post-mortem status isIn revieworCompleted.Want post-mortems to be written in-house and later exported, just add the
Draft the post-mortemsuggested task earlier in your flow, and move theExport the post-mortemtask so it's one of the last steps responders have to do, perhaps after running a debrief. This will ensure that responders export the most up-to-date version of the post-mortem.
📃 Writing externally
If you are more comfortable writing your post-mortem in an external system like Confluence, Notion or Google Docs, you can always write it there instead. Doing this means we'll export the template including with the pre-filled incident data like the incident summary and timeline, which means responders just need to fill in the sections like Impact etc.
Just head to Settings → Post-mortems and click Edit on the post-mortem template you want to be written within incident.io. Make sure to select the option to write within an external provider.
If you do this, you'll probably want to ensure that your post-incident flow involves the Export the post-mortem task, which is one of our suggested tasks. By including this, responders must export the post-mortem before the incident can be closed.