Rootly Postmortems: Auto-Reports Drive Real Learning

Traditional, manual postmortems are a well-known drain on engineering resources. They are time-consuming, inconsistent in quality, and often fail to produce meaningful change. With companies facing an average of 86 outages per year and 60% of incidents being preventable with better management, the cost of an ineffective post-incident process is significant [8]. This is where Rootly transforms the process. By automating the entire workflow, Rootly turns the incident postmortem from a tedious chore into a powerful, data-driven learning opportunity that improves system resilience.

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

Manual incident documentation presents several clear challenges that prevent teams from learning effectively. The process is inefficient, inconsistent, and often fails to drive accountability, increasing the likelihood of repeat incidents.

• Inefficient & Time-Consuming: Engineers spend valuable hours manually gathering incident timelines, sifting through Slack logs, and pulling data from various monitoring tools instead of focusing on high-value analysis [6].
• Inconsistent & Prone to Bias: The format and quality of manual reports can vary dramatically depending on the author. This lack of standardization makes it difficult to compare incidents over time and identify recurring patterns.
• Lack of Centralization: Past reports are often scattered across different shared drives, personal folders, and documentation platforms, making it nearly impossible to find and access historical data when needed.
• Poor Follow-through: Action items are a critical outcome of any postmortem, but in a manual system, they are frequently lost or ignored. Without a reliable tracking method, crucial recommendations are never implemented, and the lessons learned are quickly forgotten [7].

How Rootly Automates Postmortems to Drive Improvement

Rootly’s automation platform directly addresses the challenges of manual documentation. It streamlines the entire postmortem lifecycle, from data aggregation to action item tracking, ensuring every incident becomes a genuine learning opportunity.

Automatically Generate Postmortem Reports

Rootly automatically captures every piece of incident data—including Slack conversations, timeline events, key metrics, and contributing factors—and populates it into a customizable, pre-built template. This saves your team countless hours and ensures all relevant information is included without manual effort.

The use of AI is an emerging trend to help generate summaries and narratives from incident data, transforming complex information into a coherent story [1]. AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) can analyze alerts and chat logs to build a narrative of what happened [2]. However, while AI can be a helpful assistant, it's not a silver bullet and still requires human oversight for accuracy. Real-world tests show that AI can misinterpret key details, providing only about 20% time savings rather than a hoped-for 80% [3]. Rootly uses automation to gather objective facts, freeing your team to focus on high-value analysis and insight.

Create and Foster Blameless Postmortems

A blameless postmortem culture is essential for continuous improvement, as it focuses on systemic issues rather than individual errors. This approach, championed by tech leaders like Google and GitLab, fosters psychological safety and encourages open communication [5]. The cost of not having this culture is steep; organizations can lose an average of $15 million annually from poor data quality alone [5].

Rootly’s templates guide teams through a blameless review process. By structuring the report to ask "what" and "how" instead of "who," you steer the conversation toward constructive learning. Automation removes the blame associated with finding who forgot to document what, empowering engineers to focus on turning failures into actionable insights.

[Image: A screenshot of a Rootly postmortem template, showing fields for summary, timeline, and root cause analysis.]

Easily Share Postmortems with Cross-Functional Teams

Transparency after an incident is key to building organizational trust. Rootly integrates seamlessly with the tools your teams already use, including Confluence, Google Docs, and Notion.

With these integrations, you can configure workflows to automatically generate and share postmortem reports in your organization's preferred documentation platform. This keeps stakeholders across engineering, product, and support informed and aligned. By standardizing the report with key fields like an executive summary, timeline, and impact analysis, you ensure every postmortem is consistent and easy for any audience to understand [4].

Automate Action Item Tracking from Postmortems

Turning insights into action is the most important part of any postmortem. Rootly closes the loop by integrating directly with project management tools like Jira and Asana.

From the postmortem document, you can automatically create and assign action items as tickets in your project management system. Rootly then tracks the status of these tickets, providing clear visibility into progress and ensuring accountability. This automated follow-up prevents valuable lessons from being forgotten and guarantees that improvements are implemented. Rootly’s powerful Workflows 2.0 engine makes this level of automation easy to configure and manage.

Getting Started with Automated Postmortems in Rootly

Setting up automated postmortems in Rootly is a straightforward process that you can tailor to fit your team's specific needs.

1. Configure Your Template: Customize your postmortem templates in Rootly with the specific fields, metrics, and sections your team requires to align with your internal review process.
2. Set Up Workflows: The process begins the moment you create an incident in the web app or directly from your Slack interface. From there, create a workflow in Rootly that automatically generates a postmortem document in Confluence or Google Docs as soon as an incident is resolved.
3. Test in a Safe Environment: Before rolling out your new process, use Rootly's sandbox environments to test your templates and workflows. This allows you to fine-tune the entire setup in a non-production Slack workspace without any risk.

Conclusion: Turn Incidents into Your Greatest Learning Tool

Rootly transforms postmortems from a manual, inconsistent task into an automated, reliable engine for continuous improvement. By automating data collection, standardizing reports, and ensuring action items are tracked to completion, Rootly empowers teams to learn from every incident. The benefits are clear: you save valuable engineering time, foster a blameless culture, ensure cross-functional transparency, and drive real, lasting change. For modern SRE and platform engineering teams focused on building more resilient systems, Rootly is an essential component of any incident response playbook.

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

‍