Smarter Week

How to automate it

How to automate “write incident postmortems and reports”

Here are 2 ways to spend less time on this, best first. Each comes with steps you can follow today and, for AI fixes, a prompt to copy.

90 min
typically, once a month
60%
of the time can be automated
Easy
to set up

Fix 1 of 2

AIBest fix

Draft the postmortem from the incident timeline with AI

The incident channel, alerts and timeline already hold most of the facts. AI can assemble them into your postmortem template so you focus on causes and actions.

Typically saves about 50% of the time10 min to set up
  1. 1Export the incident channel, timeline and key graphs, or use the postmortem draft feature in incident.io, Rootly or PagerDuty.
  2. 2Paste them with your template into an approved AI assistant using the prompt below.
  3. 3Correct the timeline and write the real contributing factors yourself.
  4. 4Make sure every action item has an owner and a date.
Prompt to copy
Using our postmortem template and the incident material below, draft a blameless postmortem for [INCIDENT NAME]. Fill in: summary, customer impact (with numbers only if given), timeline in UTC, detection, contributing factors, what went well, and proposed action items with suggested owners. Mark anything not supported by the material with [CHECK]. Do not assign blame to individuals.

Template:
[PASTE]

Incident channel and timeline:
[PASTE]

Tools: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Microsoft Copilot · incident.io · Rootly · PagerDuty

Fix 2 of 2

Software feature

Use the AI in your incident and observability tools

incident.io, PagerDuty, Rootly, Datadog and Grafana now summarize incidents, group related alerts and suggest likely causes, which shortens the first confused half hour.

Typically saves about 25% of the time1 h to set up
  1. 1Check which AI features your incident and monitoring tools include (incident.io AI SRE, PagerDuty Advance, Rootly AI, Datadog Bits AI, Grafana Assistant).
  2. 2Turn on alert grouping and automatic incident summaries.
  3. 3During an incident, ask the assistant for recent deploys, related alerts and similar past incidents.
  4. 4Treat its root-cause suggestions as hypotheses to check, not answers.

Tools: incident.io · PagerDuty · Rootly · Datadog Bits AI · Grafana Assistant

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DevOps / Site reliability engineerSecurity analyst

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