post-mortem

name	post-mortem
description	Generate structured post-mortems after incidents or failures: root cause analysis, timeline, impact assessment, prevention steps.
category	system
maturity	stable
tags	["incident-response","root-cause-analysis","timeline","blameless","retrospective"]

post-mortem

Generate structured post-mortems after incidents or failures: root cause analysis, timeline, impact assessment, prevention steps.

When to Use

• Analyzing why something broke
• Documenting incidents for the team
• Creating action items after failures
• Reviewing production issues
• Running blameless retrospectives

How It Works

1. Gather incident details (what happened, when, who noticed)
2. Run generate-postmortem.sh to create a structured document
3. Use timeline-builder.sh to construct a precise event timeline
4. Use action-tracker.sh to extract and track action items
5. Review references for blameless culture and root cause categories

Scripts

Script	Purpose
generate-postmortem.sh	Generate a full post-mortem document from parameters
timeline-builder.sh	Build a formatted incident timeline from events
action-tracker.sh	Extract, list, and track action items from a post-mortem

References

File	Content
postmortem-template.md	Full post-mortem template with all sections
blameless-guide.md	Guide to running blameless post-mortems
root-cause-categories.md	Common root cause taxonomy

Example Usage

# Generate a post-mortem document
bash scripts/generate-postmortem.sh \
  --title "API Gateway Outage" \
  --severity P1 \
  --date "2024-01-15" \
  --duration "2h 30m" \
  --summary "API gateway became unresponsive due to connection pool exhaustion" \
  --output postmortem-2024-01-15.md

# Build a timeline
bash scripts/timeline-builder.sh \
  --add "14:00 Monitoring alerts fire for high latency" \
  --add "14:05 On-call engineer acknowledges alert" \
  --add "14:15 Root cause identified: connection pool exhaustion" \
  --add "14:20 Fix deployed: increased pool size" \
  --add "14:30 Service fully recovered" \
  --output timeline.md

# Track action items
bash scripts/action-tracker.sh --extract postmortem-2024-01-15.md
bash scripts/action-tracker.sh --list postmortem-2024-01-15.md