Prompt Postmortem

# Prompt — Blameless postmortem

> [🇷🇺 Русский](../ru/prompt-postmortem.md) · 🇬🇧 **English**

[← Index](./README.md) · [Standards](./standards.md) · [Template](./template.md)

tags: #prompt #postmortem #sre #ops #service #single-shot
**Status:** `🧪 Experimental`
**Owner:** Pandamy619
**Last edit:** 2026-05-20
**Version:** v1
**Source idea:** [Google SRE Workbook — Postmortem Culture](https://sre.google/workbook/postmortem-culture/), [Atlassian Blameless Postmortem](https://www.atlassian.com/incident-management/postmortem/blameless)
**Delta from original:** requires at least 3 contributing factors (not a single "root cause"), action items with owner and due date, explicit blameless-tone criteria, and a UTC timeline format.

---

## When to use

- After any S1/S2 incident (or a near-miss with serious potential)
- When raw events need to be structured into a useful document
- When the team wants a blameless practice but slips into "who's to blame"

## What to substitute

- `{{incident_id}}` — string, e.g. `INC-2026-0517-001`
- `{{incident_summary}}` — string, 1-2 sentences, e.g. `payments-api returned 500 on 18% of requests for 47 minutes`
- `{{severity}}` — enum: `S1 | S2 | S3`
- `{{detected_at}}` — ISO datetime UTC, e.g. `2026-05-17T14:23:00Z`
- `{{resolved_at}}` — ISO datetime UTC, e.g. `2026-05-17T15:10:00Z`
- `{{impacted_users}}` — string, e.g. `~12k active users; 850 payments failed`
- `{{impacted_services}}` — list, e.g. `payments-api; checkout-frontend; order-service (degraded)`
- `{{timeline_raw}}` — string, raw events for building the chronology (Slack export, alert timings)
- `{{root_cause_hypothesis}}` — string, optional, e.g. `suspect DB connection pool exhaustion`

## Definition of done

Universal minimum — see [Definition of done](./standards.md#2-definition-of-done).

Specific criteria:

- Timeline in UTC, no gaps between detection and mitigation
- At least 3 contributing factors, not a single "root cause"
- Each action item has an owner (person / team), severity (P0/P1/P2), and due date
- Tone is blameless: causes are processes and systems, not people ("the process didn't prevent X", not "Ivan forgot X")
- TL;DR is no more than 5 lines, readable in 30 seconds

## Prompt