When production outages occur, incident post-mortems must be direct, factual, and action-oriented. This template structures incident audits to extract timelines, discover root causes, and build concrete preventative tasks.
02 Weak vs. Strong
EX 01Database Connection Pool Outage
You are a Principal Reliability Engineer. Draft a post-mortem for yesterday's database outage.
Outage Details:
- Incident: Connection pool exhaustion causing API 500 errors.
- Timeline: Started 14:10 UTC; Detected 14:15 UTC via PagerDuty; Mitigated 14:35 UTC by doubling connection limit; Resolved 14:50 UTC after database restarted.
- Root Cause: Unreleased connection in new `/v1/orders` endpoint route.
Format:
1. Executive Summary
2. Incident Timeline (UTC)
3. 5 Whys Root Cause Analysis
4. Prevention Items (with owner/due date)
Tone: Blameless, analytical, technical.
→ Why it works
Structures the post-mortem into standard, actionable engineering sections. Ensures root-cause analysis is thorough rather than surface-level.