/postmortem-summary

Generate Postmortem Summary

Generate a comprehensive postmortem summary for a resolved incident, including timeline, root cause analysis, impact assessment, and action items. Uses incident data, related incidents, and AI suggestions to produce a structured retrospective.

Prerequisites

• Rootly MCP server connected with valid API credentials
• MCP tools incidents_get, find_related_incidents, suggest_solutions, incidents_by_incident_id_action_items_get, and incidents_by_incident_id_alerts_get available

Steps

1. Get incident details

   Call incidents_get to retrieve the full incident record including title, severity, status, summary, affected services, timeline timestamps, and assigned teams.

2. Verify incident is resolved

   Confirm the incident has a resolved_at timestamp. If the incident is still active, warn the user and suggest resolving it first.

3. Get attached alerts

   Call incidents_by_incident_id_alerts_get to retrieve the triggering alerts, including source (Datadog, PagerDuty, etc.) and alert metadata.

4. Find related incidents

   Call find_related_incidents to identify historical patterns. Note any recurring themes (same service, same time of day, same root cause).

5. Get AI-suggested solutions

   Call suggest_solutions to surface remediation recommendations based on past incident resolutions.

6. Get existing action items

   Call incidents_by_incident_id_action_items_get to list follow-up tasks already created.

7. Build postmortem summary

   Compile a structured postmortem with these sections:

   • Summary -- What happened in plain language
   • Timeline -- Key timestamps (detected, acknowledged, mitigated, resolved) with duration calculations
   • Impact -- Affected services, environments, and estimated user impact
   • Root Cause -- Based on incident summary, alerts, and AI suggestions
   • Detection -- How the incident was discovered (alert source, manual report)
   • Response -- Steps taken, team assignments, escalation path
   • Related Incidents -- Similar past incidents and whether the same root cause recurred
   • Action Items -- Existing items plus recommended new ones from AI analysis
   • Metrics -- Time to detect, time to acknowledge, time to mitigate, time to resolve

8. Suggest missing action items

   If the AI analysis or related incidents suggest follow-up actions not yet tracked, recommend creating them.

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
incident_id	string	Yes	The incident ID or sequential ID to summarize

Examples

Generate Postmortem for an Incident

/postmortem-summary --incident_id "inc-456"

Generate Postmortem by Sequential ID

/postmortem-summary --incident_id "INC-342"

Error Handling

• Incident Not Found: Verify the incident ID; use /incident-triage to list recent incidents
• Incident Not Resolved: The incident must be resolved before generating a postmortem summary
• Authentication Error: Verify ROOTLY_API_TOKEN is set correctly

Related Commands

• /incident-triage - List active incidents
• /action-items - List outstanding action items
• /service-status - Check current service health