Are you looking for a post mortem template in the form of a google doc that you can fill out after an incident or outage encountered by your team? The post mortem process after incidents is meant to help you identify what happened, why it happened, and how it will/can be mitigated or prevented. The contents of the post mortems are commonly desired by your stakeholders, customers, and leadership. Post mortems will help you make your system more resilient by minimizing or preventing the issue from happening again, whether that means adding in new processes or changing technology. A good free post mortem google doc template will help you achieve this improved resilience in how your org responds to incidents.

Free Post Mortem Google Doc Template

Interested in getting a comprehensive post mortem google doc template that you can use for your organization? We’ve developed an industry based post mortem google doc template that includes key sections, an explanation of content, and example data from a real world outage:

Get Our Free Post Mortem Google Doc Template By Requesting Access Here <

Writing Post Mortems

A good question to begin with when implementing a post mortem process is identifying what information your organization wants to capture, and who the audience is (internal vs external). While the recommended sections in our post mortem template would be the same regardless of audience, you may be more informal and more explicit in internal architecture or data references within the sections. After evaluating numerous post mortems from major tech companies (a few examples found at the bottom of this blog), we’ve come to the following recommendations for content:

  • Executive summary
  • The customer / service impact
  • The timeline from detection to remediation
  • Detailed summary of what went wrong
  • Any completed or outstanding action items to prevent it from happening again

Post Mortem Software

Are you looking for purpose built software to add post mortems to your incident response workflows? Checkout our preferred technology provider Lightstep Incident Response which has a native post mortem capability built into their incident response. A free trial is available.

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