Rootly: Automate Postmortems, End Manual Documentation

Postmortems are a core practice for engineering teams focused on reliability, offering a chance to learn from incidents and prevent them from recurring. However, the traditional approach involves a manual, time-consuming process that is prone to errors and inconsistency. This administrative burden diverts valuable engineering hours away from high-impact work. A healthy postmortem culture should focus on blameless learning, not tedious paperwork [1]. Rootly is the solution that automates the entire postmortem lifecycle, from data collection to action item tracking, turning incidents into opportunities for growth.

What’s the difference between Rootly postmortems and manual documentation?

The primary difference between Rootly postmortems and manual documentation lies in automation, data integrity, and consistency. While the manual process is fragmented and labor-intensive, Rootly provides a streamlined, data-rich experience that frees engineers to focus on analysis.

The Old Way: The Burden of Manual Documentation

For many engineers, the manual postmortem process is a familiar bottleneck. It's plagued by several key pain points that undermine its effectiveness:

• Inefficient & Time-Consuming: Engineers spend hours manually reconstructing timelines from scattered sources like Slack, Jira, and monitoring dashboards. With 60% of downtime being preventable with better management practices, this inefficiency is costly [2].
• Inconsistent & Prone to Bias: The format and quality of reports can vary significantly depending on the author. This makes it difficult to compare incidents or spot historical trends.
• Lack of Centralization: Reports are often scattered across various drives and platforms, making historical data nearly impossible to find and use for learning.
• Poor Follow-through: Action items documented in static reports are frequently lost or ignored, meaning crucial lessons are not implemented. This is a common challenge in incident reporting across industries, with staff often feeling their reports receive no follow-up [3].

This burdensome process prevents teams from unlocking the full value of post-incident reviews, as Rootly automates reports and ends manual documentation.

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

Rootly transforms postmortems by automatically centralizing all incident information into a single source of truth. During an incident, Rootly captures an immutable record of events, including commands, Slack messages, alerts, and role changes. This automation completely eliminates the need for manual data gathering, allowing engineers to focus on analysis rather than assembly. The result is a clear and accurate incident narrative, which is why Rootly's timeline powers clear postmortem insights.

How can Rootly automatically generate postmortem reports?

Rootly turns the multi-hour task of writing a postmortem report into a one-click action. It uses the rich, structured data captured during the incident to instantly build a comprehensive narrative, saving teams valuable time and ensuring no detail is missed.

One-Click Report Generation with a Complete Dataset

After an incident is resolved, users can generate a full postmortem report with a single click. Rootly automatically pulls all relevant data into the report, including:

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

This automation ensures teams always work with a complete and accurate dataset without tedious copy-pasting.

Customizable Templates to Foster Blameless Postmortems

For continuous improvement, a blameless postmortem culture is essential, a practice championed by tech leaders like Google [4]. Rootly’s customizable templates help guide teams through a blameless review. By structuring the report to ask "what" and "how" instead of "who," templates steer the conversation toward constructive, systemic learning rather than individual fault. This structured approach helps teams embrace a blameless post-incident process for real insights.

How does Rootly automate action item tracking from postmortems?

The true value of a postmortem is measured by the improvements it inspires. Rootly ensures that lessons learned from an incident translate into concrete actions by automating the creation and tracking of follow-up tasks.

Seamless Integration with Jira, Asana, and More

Rootly features powerful, two-way integrations with project management tools. Action items identified in a Rootly postmortem can be automatically synced as tickets in platforms like Jira, Linear, and Asana. This places tasks directly into engineering backlogs where work happens, dramatically increasing visibility and the likelihood of completion. The two-way sync also keeps the status updated in Rootly when a ticket is changed in Jira, creating a single, cohesive system for managing follow-up.

How can Rootly share postmortems with cross-functional teams easily?

Incidents often impact the entire business, from customer support to the executive team, making transparent communication crucial. Rootly simplifies the process of sharing learnings with all stakeholders to improve organizational alignment.

A Centralized, Searchable Knowledge Base

All postmortems generated in Rootly are stored in a centralized and easily searchable repository. This creates an invaluable knowledge base that can be used for identifying trends, onboarding new engineers, and demonstrating compliance. It stands in stark contrast to manual documents scattered across disconnected platforms, which makes widespread sharing difficult [5].

Automated Sharing to Slack, Confluence, and Email

With Rootly, you can configure workflows to automatically share completed reports through your organization's preferred channels. For example, you can post a summary to a public Slack channel, email a report to leadership, or push the full document to a Confluence page or Google Doc. This keeps non-technical teams informed without any manual effort from your engineering team.

How can Rootly summarize postmortem data across multiple incidents?

To improve your incident response, you need to be able to measure it. Rootly's built-in analytics and centralized data provide clear visibility into team performance and systemic issues over time.

Track Key Metrics to Identify Bottlenecks

Rootly provides a built-in analytics dashboard for tracking key performance indicators (KPIs). It helps you automatically track the four core incident response metrics:

• Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)
• Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)
• Mean Time to Mitigate (MTTM)
• Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)

This data allows teams to spot trends, identify bottlenecks in the incident lifecycle, and make informed decisions to optimize workloads and prevent burnout.

Conclusion: Turn Incidents into Your Greatest Learning Tool

Rootly transforms postmortems from a manual chore into an automated engine for continuous improvement. By automating data collection, report generation, and action item tracking, Rootly saves valuable engineering time and fosters a blameless culture. It ensures cross-functional transparency and drives real, measurable change, making it an essential component of any modern incident response playbook. With Rootly, auto-reports drive real learning and help you build more resilient systems.

Ready to see how automated postmortems can drive real learning for your team? Book a demo of Rootly today.

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