Postmortem: Incident title

Field	Value
Incident ID	INC-YYYY-NNNN
Severity	SEV-1 / SEV-2 / SEV-3
Duration	YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm - HH:mm (NN min)
Impact	What users experienced
Author	@you
Status	Draft / Final

Summary

Two sentences: what broke, how many users affected, how it was resolved.

Timeline (all times UTC)

Time	Event
14:02	Alert fires: elevated 5xx on /api
14:08	On-call acknowledges, begins investigation
14:25	Root cause identified: bad deploy v2.3.1
14:31	Rollback initiated
14:38	Service recovered

Root cause

Technical explanation of what actually failed. Include the contributing factors, not just the trigger.

flowchart TD
    A[Deploy v2.3.1] --> B[Config flag missing]
    B --> C[Null pointer on request path]
    C --> D[5xx spike]

What went well

• Detection was fast (alert within 2 min)
• Rollback runbook worked as written

What went poorly

• Deploy pipeline did not catch the missing flag
• Runbook step 3 was outdated

Action items

Action	Owner	Due	Priority
Add config validation to CI	@dev	YYYY-MM-DD	P0
Update rollback runbook	@ops	YYYY-MM-DD	P1
Add canary deploy stage	@dev	YYYY-MM-DD	P1

Lessons learned

The takeaway that changes how we build or operate going forward.