Postmortem Templates
Reusable blameless postmortem structures tailored by incident class. Pick a template to start a new draft with predefined sections.
Standard Postmortem
StandardDefault blameless postmortem template for most production incidents. Covers impact, root cause, contributing factors, action items, and lessons learned.
Sections preview
Impact Summary
User-facing and business impact with quantified metrics.
Root Cause
The technical reason the incident occurred.
Contributing Factors
Conditions that amplified or enabled the failure.
Action Items
Concrete, owned, dated remediation tasks.
Lessons Learned
What went well, what didn't, what to change.
Security Incident
SecurityStructured postmortem for security breaches, vulnerability exploits, and access-control failures. Includes blast radius and detection gaps.
Sections preview
Impact Summary
Affected systems, accounts, data, and security boundaries.
Root Cause
Vector, exploited weakness, and entry point.
Contributing Factors
Detection gaps, misconfigurations, missing controls.
Action Items
Remediation, hardening, and detection improvements.
Lessons Learned
Threat model gaps, control failures, and process changes.
Data Incident
DataPostmortem for data loss, corruption, consistency violations, or migration failures. Focuses on data integrity and recovery.
Sections preview
Impact Summary
Records affected, scope of corruption or loss.
Root Cause
Schema, query, or migration failure mechanism.
Contributing Factors
Missing constraints, lack of validation, backup gaps.
Action Items
Recovery, integrity checks, and prevention controls.
Lessons Learned
Data-handling and migration process improvements.
Vendor-Caused
VendorPostmortem template for incidents caused by third-party provider outages, API changes, or upstream regressions.
Sections preview
Impact Summary
Customer impact caused by the vendor failure.
Root Cause
Vendor-side issue and the dependency path.
Contributing Factors
Single-vendor dependency, no fallback, no circuit breaker.
Action Items
Mitigation, fallback strategy, vendor SLA review.
Lessons Learned
Vendor risk management and dependency isolation.
Capacity Event
CapacityPostmortem for saturation, throttling, or scaling failures. Includes load analysis and capacity planning follow-ups.
Sections preview
Impact Summary
Degraded performance, throttling, or outage duration.
Root Cause
Bottleneck resource and triggering load pattern.
Contributing Factors
Missing autoscaling, capacity review, or alert thresholds.
Action Items
Capacity scaling, alert tuning, headroom targets.
Lessons Learned
Capacity planning and load testing improvements.
Customer-Facing Outage
Customer-FacingExternal-impact postmortem requiring executive review, customer communication log, and SLA-credit considerations.
Sections preview
Impact Summary
External duration, affected regions, customer count, SLA breach.
Root Cause
The trigger and propagation path of the customer-visible failure.
Contributing Factors
Single points of failure, slow detection, escalation delay.
Action Items
Prevention, faster detection, communication automation.
Lessons Learned
Status-page process, customer comms, executive review.
Standard Section Definitions
Every SentinelGrid postmortem template includes these five core sections to ensure consistent blameless review.
Impact
Quantified user & business impact
Root Cause
Technical reason the incident occurred
Contributing Factors
Conditions that amplified the failure
Action Items
Owned, dated remediation tasks
Lessons
What went well, what didn't