One of the things we’ve heard repeatedly is that writing post-mortems often feels harder and more heavyweight than it needs to be. Writing a comprehensive post-mortem in an external system can feel like overkill when a quick and easy writeup would do the trick, which means many incidents get a written summary, but not much else.
Well, we’re incredibly excited to announce that you can now write and complete post-mortems directly within incident.io 🎉.
We’ve written a help article on our new dashboard post-mortem experience here — read on for the highlights!
Whilst we know this won’t work for everyone, a few benefits of writing post-mortems in incident.io include:
When writing a post-mortem in the dashboard, rather than a document with lots of placeholders, guidance, and text-only UI, responders get a much smoother and designed experience.
They get help text to guide them, the ability to quickly attach and ensure relevant custom fields are up to date and the option to add images as supplementary evidence - especially helpful for preserving charts from an observability tool.
Yes! We know many customers might want rich data in incident.io, but still want to maintain a copy for their records and knowledge base in an external system like Notion, Google Docs, or Confluence.
No problem: when you’re finished writing the post-mortem just hit Export
and we’ll move the contents over. This means you still get all the benefits of writing in the dashboard first, without breaking any company process or expectations.
You can configure whether a template will prompt you to write the post-mortem in the dashboard or an external editor. To add a new template for writing in the dashboard, or to configure this on an existing template, head to Post-mortem → Settings and click Edit
on the template you want to be written in-house.
Want to see it in action? Check out the live demo walkthrough with our Co-founder and CPO, Chris:
Last week was a big week for the dashboard! We also took the opportunity to take some of our newer design patterns and apply them to the incident homepage, which now looks much cleaner. Key changes:
The “Overview” tab is now your one-stop-shop for a live incident
You can switch the activity panel from Highlights
to All activity
if you want to investigate the state of the incident at particular points, or who set a custom field.
We’ll now also highlight things you might want to do in order to get that incident resolved e.g. add an action, start a call, or create a stream.
We have a new “Post-incident” tab
This should be your go-to for ensuring everything is in order after an incident is over. Completing the post-incident flow, tracking follow-ups, curating your timeline, and writing a post-mortem, for example.
We’ve condensed more information into the sidebar
We’ve condensed a lot of information that was previously across multiple tabs and sections into the sidebar, making it easier to find what you need more quickly. In particular, we now roll up your escalation, alerts, and attachments to summarize which types of resources were involved.
🚀What else we’ve shipped