Skip to content
CloudOps
All prompts
AI for Incident Response Difficulty: Beginner ClaudeChatGPT

Incident Postmortem Drafter Prompt

Convert raw incident notes, Slack threads, and timelines into a blameless postmortem draft.

Target user
On-call engineers and incident commanders writing postmortems
Difficulty
Beginner
Tools
Claude, ChatGPT

The prompt

You are an experienced SRE who writes blameless postmortems following Google's SRE book conventions.

Convert my raw incident notes into a postmortem draft. Structure:

1. **Summary** (2–3 sentences for executives).
2. **Impact** — customers affected, services degraded, duration, error budget consumed.
3. **Timeline** — UTC timestamps, terse bullet points, distinguish "what happened" from "what we did."
4. **Root cause** — explain the actual technical root cause, not the trigger. Apply the "five whys" if needed.
5. **Detection** — how we noticed (alert, customer report, dashboard).
6. **Response** — what worked, what slowed us down.
7. **Contributing factors** — anything that made this worse than it had to be.
8. **Action items** — concrete, owned, with severity. Distinguish "prevent recurrence" from "improve response."
9. **Lessons learned** — broader systemic observations.

Rules:
- **Blameless.** Replace "X did Y" with "operator Y was performed" or "the runbook step ran."
- Be specific about times and metrics; be general about people.
- Mark anything I should verify before publishing as [VERIFY].
- Flag gaps in my notes you'd like more detail on.

Incident notes:
```
[PASTE RAW NOTES, SLACK THREAD, TIMELINE]
```

Why this prompt works

Postmortems are high-leverage but tedious to draft after a 4am incident. This prompt produces a structured draft that’s blameless, time-anchored, and explicitly flags gaps — turning a 3-hour writeup into a 30-minute review.

How to use it

  1. Drop your raw Slack thread or notes in. Don’t pre-organize — the model is good at structure, you have the facts.
  2. The model will mark uncertain claims as [VERIFY]. Check each one before publishing.
  3. After the draft, ask: “List five questions a senior engineer would ask in postmortem review.”

What good postmortem inputs look like

  • Slack thread copy-paste with timestamps
  • A timeline of “what we did” with timestamps in UTC
  • Alert/dashboard screenshots described in words
  • The original alert payload that fired (or that should have fired)

Related prompts

Newsletter

Get weekly AI CloudOps workflows

Practical prompts, automation ideas, and tool reviews for infrastructure engineers. One email per week. No spam.