Incident Postmortems

Incident Postmortems allows for a team to evaluate what had happened in the incident(s) that had just occurred and learn from past downtime, outages and other similar incidents.

Postmortems in Zenduty allow for convenient creation of PDF reports that can be formed surrounding information of the incident(or group of incidents) in markdown format.

Creating a Postmortem

1. To create a Postmortem, go to the Postmortems tab from the secondary side-bar under the associated team and click on the Create new Postmortem button.
   

2. Enter a suitable title and select the author of the postmortem. You'll be redirected to the postmortem creation page. Fill in the status of the incident for which you're creating the postmortem.
   

3. Add the incident(s) that are covered by the postmortem using the Incident picker.
   

4. Create new post-incident tasks associated with the incidents or import existing ones.
   

5. Scroll down and proceed to fill in the meat of the postmortem, the postmortem report. You can manually summarise the incidents as per your needs, or use Postmortem templates.

   • A Postmortem template allows for standardized Postmortems to be created from Zenduty. These templates are written in markdown and can be imported while creating a Postmortem.
     You can use the default templates previously designed by other organisations or create a new template by clicking on the Show templates button and then on Create a custom template.
   • Some users would want the same template to be applied for every postmortem, To achieve this, we can set a template as a Default Template, essentially auto applying it to every new postmortem.
   • Note: This overwrites the postmortem data that was already typed in, so be careful to save your progress!

   

6. Finalize the postmortem by clicking on the Save Postmortem button, head back to the list of postmortems and click on the Generate Report button to get a downloadable Postmortem Report in a PDF format.

   

[Coming soon]: Slack Conversations for Incident Postmortems

Team members often discuss and collaborate on incident resolution within the channel. To enhance the incident postmortem process, Zenduty will soon allow postmortem authors to import relevant conversations from the Slack channel and attach them to the postmortem report. This feature will enable teams to maintain a comprehensive record of discussions, decisions, and actions taken during the incident, providing better context and facilitating more thorough post-incident analysis and review. It will ensure that all key insights are captured for future learnings and improvements.