Incident Postmortem Skill

Writing postmortems after a production outage is a tedious, high-stakes task that often falls to exhausted engineers. This skill converts messy incident notes, Slack logs, and monitoring alerts into structured, blameless documentation. It removes the friction of formatting and categorization while ensuring the final report focuses on systemic improvements rather than human error.

What it does

• Evidence synthesis transforms raw logs and timestamps into a cohesive narrative.
• Root cause isolation distinguishes between triggers, contributing factors, and core systemic weaknesses.
• Impact quantification summarizes affected services and customer symptoms based strictly on provided data.
• Blameless analysis reframes errors as process or tooling gaps to maintain engineering culture.
• Actionable remediation generates prioritized tasks for prevention and verification.

How it works

1. Provide the raw incident data, including timestamps, log snippets, and response notes.
2. The skill analyzes the sequence of events to build a chronological timeline.
3. It categorizes detection gaps, response delays, and technical failures.
4. Review the structured report, action items, and identified prevention plans.

Frameworks & tools

This skill is framework-agnostic and works with data from PagerDuty, Jira, Datadog, Slack, and AWS CloudWatch logs.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Generic prompts often hallucinate root causes or use judgmental language that damages team morale. This skill enforces a strict blameless methodology and clearly labels missing information instead of filling gaps with fabrications.

Use cases

• Drafting official SRE postmortems after a high-severity production outage.
• Summarizing internal incident response for weekly engineering leadership reviews.
• Converting chaotic Slack incident channel logs into a structured knowledge base.

Known limitations

This skill cannot access live systems to pull logs directly. It relies entirely on the text provided by the user and will not invent missing timestamps or owners.