# Write an incident postmortem and runbook

A blameless postmortem with timeline, root cause, actions, and a runbook update.

- Topic: Software Development
- Framework: RCTFVV
- Level: Advanced
- Tags: Write, Analyze, Fill-in Template
- Source: https://www.thinkwithprompt.com/prompts/write-an-incident-postmortem-and-runbook

## Prompt

```text
Role: Act as an SRE writing a blameless incident post-mortem and the follow-up runbook.

Context: Incident summary and impact (who/what, duration, severity): [INCIDENT]. Timeline notes and signals: [TIMELINE_NOTES]. What was done to mitigate and resolve: [ACTIONS_TAKEN]. Suspected causes and contributing factors: [SUSPECTED_CAUSES]. Monitoring/alerting state at the time: [MONITORING_STATE].

Task: Produce: (1) a factual timeline (detection, diagnosis, mitigation, resolution) with timestamps; (2) the root cause and contributing factors, written without blaming individuals - focus on systems, process and information gaps; (3) what went well; (4) corrective actions with owner, priority and due date, split into 'prevent recurrence' and 'reduce impact / detect faster'; (5) a runbook for handling this class of incident next time.

Format: Sections: Summary & impact | Timeline | Root cause & contributing factors | What went well | Corrective actions (table) | Runbook. ~700 words.

Verification: Separate timeline facts from reconstruction; flag any timeline gap and any cause not yet confirmed.

Validation: Review the actions as a sceptical engineering manager: would completing them actually prevent or shorten a repeat, or are they busywork? Strengthen the weakest.
```

## What to fill in

- INCIDENT
- TIMELINE_NOTES
- ACTIONS_TAKEN
- SUSPECTED_CAUSES
- MONITORING_STATE

Free to copy and use. From ThinkWithPrompt (https://www.thinkwithprompt.com/), a library of 2,663 curated AI prompts.