Postmortem - incident review

A postmortem is a public incident review that you publish on your status page after an outage. Visitors and clients can see what happened, who was affected and what you are doing so it does not happen again. Transparency after an outage builds more trust than silence.

How to add a postmortem

1. Open the detail of your status page in Status pages.
2. Add a new update and check Postmortem.
3. Fill in the structured fields:

• Root cause - what exactly caused the incident (for example a load balancer configuration error after a deployment).
• Impact - who and what was affected (for example "about 12% of users did not complete an order for 47 minutes").
• Action items - what you will do so it does not happen again.

Where it appears

The postmortem is added to the timeline of the public status page for the given incident. If you also tick to notify subscribers when adding it, they receive an e-mail about it just like with other updates.

How to write a good postmortem

• Write factually and without blame - the goal is a lesson learned, not finding a culprit.
• Be specific about time and impact (when it started, when it ended, who was affected).
• Phrase action items as verifiable steps, not general promises.