Post-incident review

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• Incident title

  For example: Checkout unavailable for 47 minutes

• Date of incident

  For example: 11 October 2027

• Severity

  For example: High

• Incident lead

  For example: Hamza Idrissi

• Review written by

  For example: Anna Berg

• Date of review

  For example: 14 October 2027

• Summary

  For example: On 11 October from 14:03 to 14:50 customers could not pay. A database change filled the disk and the checkout service stopped.

• Impact

  For example: About 310 failed payment attempts. Estimated lost sales of EUR 9,000. 42 support tickets. No data was lost.

• Timeline

  Times with what happened. Facts only.

  For example: 14:03 Alert for failed payments 14:08 On-call engineer starts looking 14:21 Cause found: disk full 14:38 Old logs removed, service restarted 14:50 Payments working, incident closed

• Causes

  Look for system causes, not a person to blame.

  For example: Direct cause: the disk reached 100 percent. Underlying causes: no alert for disk use, log files were never rotated, the change was not tested with real data volumes.

• What went well

  For example: The payment alert fired in 3 minutes. The team worked together and kept customers informed on the status page.

• What went badly or was lucky

  For example: Finding the cause took 18 minutes because the dashboard did not show disk use. The runbook was out of date.

• Follow-up actions

  One row for each action.

  For example: Add a disk alert at 80 percent | Hamza Idrissi | 21 October Set up log rotation | Daniel Roche | 21 October Update the runbook | Anna Berg | 28 October

• Lessons for other teamsoptional

  For example: All services should have disk alerts and log rotation.

1. 1Summary
2. 2Impact
3. 3Timeline
4. 4Causes
5. 5What went well
6. 6What went badly or was lucky
7. 7Follow-up actions
8. 8Lessons for others

1. 01

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What details does this template ask for?

The form asks for 14 details, starting with Incident title, Date of incident, Severity, Incident lead, Review written by. 1 more are optional.

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Most are. Fill in and download them for free as Word or PDF, with no account. A few longer documents are premium: free to fill in, paid once to download, and marked with their price.

Does a security policy make us secure?

No document does that alone. A policy helps when it matches what people really do, so keep it short, explain it to your team and review it every year.

Is a project charter only for large projects?

No. A small project benefits too, because one page that names the goal, the limits and the decision maker prevents most arguments later.

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