incident-postmortem

Generate structured, blame-free incident postmortem reports from logs, timeline data, and incident metadata. Produces root cause analysis, impact assessment, timeline reconstruction, lessons learned, and action items. Supports log parsing (syslog, JSON, Apache/Nginx, Python tracebacks), timeline JSON input, blame-free language checking, and multiple output formats (markdown, HTML, JSON). Use when asked to create a postmortem, write an incident report, document an outage, generate a post-incident review, analyze incident timeline, check postmortem language for blame, create RCA (root cause analysis), or produce an after-action report. Triggers on "postmortem", "incident report", "outage report", "post-incident", "root cause analysis", "RCA", "after-action", "blameless review", "incident review".

Generate structured, blame-free incident postmortem reports with timeline reconstruction, log analysis, and action item tracking.

Quick Start

bash

# Create a postmortem from scratch (fills in template sections)
python3 scripts/generate_postmortem.py --title "Database outage" --severity P1

# Parse logs to auto-extract timeline events
python3 scripts/generate_postmortem.py --title "API latency" --log /var/log/app.log --since 2h

# Load a complete incident from JSON
python3 scripts/generate_postmortem.py --from incident.json --output html -o postmortem.html

# Combine logs + manual timeline
python3 scripts/generate_postmortem.py --title "Deploy failure" --log /var/log/deploy.log --timeline events.json

# Check existing document for blameful language
python3 scripts/generate_postmortem.py --check-blame existing-report.md

Features

1. Log parsing — Auto-detects syslog, JSON, Apache/Nginx, Python tracebacks, Docker, generic timestamped formats. Extracts errors, warnings, and notable events into a timeline.
2. Timeline reconstruction — Merges log-extracted events with manual timeline JSON. Sorted chronologically with event type labels (detection, action, escalation, resolution).
3. Blame-free language — Built-in checker scans for blameful patterns and suggests alternatives. Use --check-blame on any document.
4. Severity classification — P0 (critical) through P3 (low) with appropriate descriptions.
5. Multiple outputs — Markdown (default), HTML (styled), JSON (structured).
6. CI-friendly exit codes — 0 (clean), 1 (errors found), 2 (critical severity).
7. Template sections — Summary, impact, timeline, root cause, detection, resolution, lessons learned, action items.

Options

Flag	Default	Description
--title	required	Incident title
--severity	P2	P0, P1, P2, or P3
--date	today	Incident date
--duration	TBD	How long it lasted
--summary	—	Brief summary text
--log	—	Log file path (repeatable)
--since	all	Time filter for logs (1h, 24h, 7d)
--timeline	—	Timeline JSON file
--from	—	Load full incident from JSON
--output	markdown	Output format: markdown, html, json
-o	stdout	Output file path
--check-blame	—	Check file for blameful language

Workflow

After an Incident

1. Gather logs: --log /var/log/app.log --log /var/log/nginx/error.log --since 4h
2. Generate draft: python3 scripts/generate_postmortem.py --title "..." --severity P1 --log ... -o draft.md
3. Fill in template sections (summary, root cause, impact, resolution)
4. Run blame check: --check-blame draft.md
5. Add action items and share

From Structured Data

1. Create incident.json with full details (see references/templates.md for schema)
2. Generate: --from incident.json --output html -o postmortem.html

Periodic Review

Use JSON output to track action item completion across multiple postmortems.

References

• templates.md — Full JSON schema, timeline event types, blame-free language guide with replacements