Generate a Blameless Post-Mortem Report in 5 Minutes
Enter your incident timeline and impact. AI writes a complete RCA report with root cause analysis, action items, and lessons learned.
Generate a Blameless Post-Mortem Report in 5 Minutes
River's Post-Mortem Generator creates comprehensive incident reports in minutes. Paste your incident timeline and impact, and the AI writes a complete blameless post-mortem including executive summary, detailed timeline, root cause analysis (RCA), contributing factors, quantified impact, action items with owners, and lessons learned. Used by 500+ engineering teams at startups and enterprises.
Unlike blame-focused reports that discourage honesty, we create learning-focused documentation following Google SRE best practices. The AI structures information for both executives (summary + impact) and engineers (technical details + root cause), focuses on system improvements rather than individual fault, and ensures action items are specific with owners and deadlines. You get post-mortems that actually prevent recurrence.
Perfect for engineering managers after production incidents, SREs documenting outages, teams practicing blameless post-mortems, or any organization building a reliability culture. Whether it's a P0 outage or a minor bug, systematic post-mortems improve systems over time.
What Makes Post-Mortems Effective
The best post-mortems prevent future incidents through honest learning. They're blameless (focus on systems, not people), thorough (complete timeline from detection to resolution), actionable (specific improvements with owners and deadlines), quantified (measure impact in users, revenue, and time), and timely (written within 48 hours while details are fresh). They identify root causes (not just symptoms), document the Swiss cheese model of contributing factors, and create accountability for follow-through.
Common post-mortem failures: assigning blame (kills future honesty), vague action items ('improve monitoring'), no owners or deadlines, skipping what went well, and never following up on action items. Strong post-mortems have specific, measurable improvements ('Add alert for database connection pool > 90%. Owner: Jane. Due: Dec 10') and scheduled follow-up to ensure completion.
The 5 Whys technique helps find root cause. Why did checkout fail? Database connection errors. Why? Migration ran in wrong order. Why? Migration naming caused lexicographic vs timestamp sorting. Why? No validation in deployment pipeline. Why? We never defined migration ordering standards. Root cause: Lack of migration ordering validation—not 'someone made a mistake.'
What Your Post-Mortem Includes
Executive summary for leadership (impact + resolution in 60 seconds)
Detailed minute-by-minute timeline from detection to resolution
Root cause analysis using 5 Whys methodology
Contributing factors and Swiss cheese model analysis
Quantified impact: users affected, revenue lost, engineering hours
Prioritized action items with owners and due dates
What went well + what went wrong sections
Lessons learned for organizational memory
How It Works
- 1Paste incident detailsEnter timeline, impact numbers, and what you know about root cause
- 2AI writes complete post-mortemGenerates comprehensive report in 5-8 minutes with all sections
- 3Review with teamAdd specific technical details, assign action item owners
- 4Share and trackDistribute to engineering, schedule follow-up for action items
Frequently Asked Questions
Should post-mortems name individuals who made mistakes?
No. Blameless post-mortems focus on system failures, not individual fault. When someone makes a mistake, ask why the system allowed it: inadequate testing? Unclear procedures? Time pressure? Naming individuals discourages honesty and future reporting. Systems thinking prevents recurrence better than blame. If your culture punishes mistakes, people hide them.
How soon after an incident should the post-mortem be written?
Within 48 hours while details are fresh. Schedule the post-mortem meeting within 24 hours of resolution, then write the report immediately after. Delays lead to forgotten details and rationalized narratives. If you wait a week, you'll remember the conclusion but forget the confusion of the actual investigation.
Who should be involved in the post-mortem process?
Everyone involved in the incident: on-call responders, engineers who debugged, managers who made decisions, support who handled customers. Multiple perspectives reveal the complete picture. Include junior engineers (they learn most from these). Rotate facilitator role (spreads the skill). Psychological safety is essential for honest discussion.
What makes a good action item?
Specific, actionable, assigned to an owner, with a deadline. Bad: 'Improve monitoring.' Good: 'Add alert for database connection pool > 90% utilization. Owner: Jane. Due: Dec 10. Success criteria: Alert fires in test environment.' Action items without owners don't get done. Deadlines without dates slip forever. Be specific and accountable.
Should we share post-mortems publicly?
Many companies share externally (builds trust, helps industry)—see Cloudflare, GitLab, and Google's public post-mortems. At minimum, share internally across engineering. Learning compounds when shared. Hiding failures prevents organizational learning. Redact sensitive details (security vulnerabilities, customer data), but transparency about failures demonstrates maturity.
What's the difference between RCA and post-mortem?
RCA (Root Cause Analysis) focuses specifically on finding why the incident happened. Post-mortem is broader: it includes RCA plus timeline, impact quantification, what went well, action items, and lessons learned. A post-mortem contains an RCA section, but RCA alone isn't a complete post-mortem.
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