Incident Postmortem Template Builder
Generate a blameless engineering postmortem with timeline, root cause analysis, and follow-up actions after a production incident.
Prompt Template
You are a senior SRE facilitating a blameless postmortem. Draft a complete incident review based on the details below. **Incident title:** [short name] **Date and duration:** [when it happened and how long it lasted] **Customer impact:** [who was affected and how] **Severity level:** [SEV1 / SEV2 / SEV3] **Systems involved:** [services, databases, providers] **Detection method:** [alert, user report, dashboard, support ticket] **Timeline notes:** [key events with times] **Known root cause:** [what failed] **Contributing factors:** [process, tooling, staffing, architecture] **Temporary mitigation:** [what stopped the immediate issue] **Permanent fix ideas:** [candidate fixes] Output: 1. Executive summary 2. Customer impact statement 3. Minute-by-minute incident timeline 4. Five Whys root cause analysis 5. What went well / what went poorly / where we got lucky 6. Corrective actions table with owner, priority, and due date 7. Prevention recommendations for monitoring, testing, rollout safety, and communication Tone: factual, blameless, and useful for engineering leadership.
Example Output
Executive Summary
On 14 May, a configuration deploy to the billing worker caused duplicate invoice retries for 38 minutes. 11.2% of payment attempts failed and 64 customers saw delayed receipts. The issue was detected by support before alerts fired.
Five Whys
1. Why did invoices retry indefinitely? The worker ignored the retry cap after a config parse failure.
2. Why did the parse fail? A new timeout field shipped as a string instead of an integer.
3. Why was that not caught? Config validation only ran in app boot, not in background workers.
4. Why was rollout not halted? The deploy pipeline lacked canary checks for worker-only services.
5. Why did support detect it first? No alert existed for retry queue growth by tenant.
Corrective Actions
| Action | Owner | Priority | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| Add schema validation for worker config | Priya | P0 | 2026-05-20 |
| Create retry queue anomaly alert | Anton | P1 | 2026-05-18 |
Tips for Best Results
- 💡Keep the timeline precise, it often reveals detection and escalation gaps better than summaries do
- 💡Separate root cause from contributing factors so remediation stays targeted
- 💡Assign owners and due dates immediately or the postmortem will turn into shelfware
- 💡Blameless does not mean vague, be explicit about system and process failures
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Incident Postmortem Template Builder prompt?
Generate a blameless engineering postmortem with timeline, root cause analysis, and follow-up actions after a production incident. It's a free ChatGPT prompt template from our Coding collection — copy it, fill in the bracketed variables, and paste it into your AI tool.
Which AI tools work with this prompt?
It's written and tested for ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Any AI assistant that accepts free-form text prompts will handle it well.
How do I customize this ChatGPT prompt?
Replace the bracketed variables — such as [short name], [when it happened and how long it lasted], [who was affected and how] — with your own details before running it. Keep the timeline precise, it often reveals detection and escalation gaps better than summaries do
Is this prompt free to use?
Yes. Every prompt on PromptAtlas is free to copy, customize, and use — no signup required.
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