Rootly: Automate Postmortems & Action Item Tracking

Traditional, manual postmortems are a significant drain on engineering resources, being time-consuming and often inconsistent. With companies experiencing an average of 86 outages annually, the cost of an ineffective post-incident process is high [1]. Rootly is the solution that transforms this process by automating the entire workflow, turning postmortems into a data-driven learning opportunity.

What’s the Difference Between Rootly Postmortems and Manual Documentation?

The main differences between Rootly postmortems and manual documentation are automation, data integrity, and consistency. These advancements allow engineers to focus on high-value analysis and system improvement rather than manual data assembly.

The Old Way: Burdensome Manual Docs

The traditional manual process requires engineers to spend hours reconstructing incident timelines from scattered sources like Slack, Jira, and monitoring tools.

This approach comes with several key pain points:

• Critical data is easily missed, leading to incomplete analysis.
• Reports are inconsistent in format and quality, making it hard to identify trends.
• Action items get lost in static documents and are often forgotten.

This manual toil is a primary reason teams rush or even skip postmortems, undermining the learning process [2].

The Rootly Way: Automated, Consistent, and Data-Rich

Rootly transforms postmortems by automatically centralizing all incident-related information into a single source of truth. The platform captures an immutable timeline, including commands run, Slack messages, alerts, and role changes, which eliminates manual data gathering. This provides an accurate and comprehensive foundation for every postmortem. With Rootly, teams can automate reports and end manual documentation.

How Can Rootly Automatically Generate Postmortem Reports?

Rootly’s one-click report generation turns a multi-hour task into a simple action. Once an incident is resolved, Rootly automatically pulls all relevant data into a comprehensive report.

This includes:

• A detailed incident timeline with precise timestamps
• Key metrics like Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR)
• A list of all participants and their roles
• Associated Slack conversations, Jira tickets, and action items

You can use fully customizable templates with custom questions and fields to align with your company’s specific learning objectives. While AI can help generate summaries, Rootly's core strength is using automation to gather objective facts, freeing up your team for high-value analysis [1].

How Does Rootly Automate Action Item Tracking from Postmortems?

A postmortem's value is measured by the improvements it inspires. Rootly allows teams to create and assign actionable follow-up tasks directly within the postmortem interface, establishing clear ownership from the start.

The platform's seamless, two-way integrations with project management tools like Jira, Linear, and Asana place tasks directly into engineering backlogs. Status updates in those tools are reflected back in Rootly, providing complete visibility. These Action Items ensure that learnings translate into concrete change. Furthermore, integrations with tools like Glean can improve accountability by making it easy to track action items from postmortems [7].

What’s the Best Way to Create Blameless Postmortems in Rootly?

A blameless postmortem culture is essential for continuous improvement and psychological safety. This practice, used by tech leaders, shifts the focus from "who" caused an issue to "what" and "how" systems can be improved.

Rootly’s templates are structured to guide teams through a blameless review process by asking the right questions. Automation is a key enabler of this culture; by removing the burden of manual documentation, it also removes the blame associated with forgetting to log a detail. This empowers engineers to focus on insights, not defense. With Rootly, your auto-reports drive real learning.

How Can Rootly Share Postmortems with Cross-Functional Teams Easily?

Incidents impact the entire business, and Rootly simplifies sharing learnings with all stakeholders. The platform’s centralized, searchable repository creates a valuable knowledge base for identifying patterns and onboarding new engineers.

You can configure workflows to automatically share reports to tools like Slack, Confluence, Google Docs, and email. This keeps non-technical teams—including customer support, legal, and executives—informed without manual effort. The integration with Notion, for example, allows for the automatic generation of incident timelines and postmortems directly within a team's workspace [3].

Getting Started with Automated Postmortems in Rootly

Setting up automated postmortems in Rootly is a straightforward process.

1. Configure Your Template: Customize postmortem templates in Rootly to align with your internal review process and add fields for the data you want to track.
2. Set Up Workflows: Create a workflow that automatically generates a postmortem document once an incident is resolved. Incidents can be initiated through the web app or directly from the Slack interface.
3. Test in a Safe Environment: Use Rootly's sandbox environments to test your templates and workflows without risk, allowing you to fine-tune the process before deploying it across your organization.

Conclusion: Turn Incidents into Your Greatest Learning Tool

Using Rootly for postmortems saves engineering time, improves data accuracy, fosters a blameless culture, and drives real change through tracked action items. Rootly transforms postmortems from a chore into a reliable engine for continuous improvement. The platform’s capabilities extend to automating the entire incident management lifecycle, from creating Slack channels and Zoom rooms to tracking metrics [5].

Book a demo of Rootly today.

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