Postmortem

What Is Postmortem

A postmortem in incident management is a structured review conducted after an incident is resolved to analyze what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent similar incidents in the future. This collaborative process documents the incident timeline, root causes, impact, and actions taken to resolve the issue.

Why Is Postmortem Important

Postmortems create organizational learning opportunities from incidents. They help teams identify systemic weaknesses, improve incident response procedures, and prevent recurring problems. A blameless postmortem culture encourages honest communication and focuses on process improvements rather than individual mistakes.

Example Of Postmortem

After a two-hour service outage, a team conducts a postmortem that reveals a database configuration change caused cascading failures. They document the timeline, impact (2,000 affected users), resolution steps, and identify that the lack of pre-deployment testing was the root cause.

How To Create Postmortem With Spike

• Go to any resolved incident in Spike.
• Click “Create Postmortem” to start a ready-made template with all incident details.
• Add your timeline, impact, root cause, and action items.
• Share the postmortem link with your team for feedback and follow-up.

Make every incident a learning opportunity—create your first postmortem in Spike.