Rootly Postmortems: Automate Reports, End Manual Docs

Creating postmortems after an incident is a core practice for any engineering team committed to reliability. However, the traditional approach is often a manual, time-consuming process that’s prone to human error and inconsistency. This administrative burden diverts valuable engineering hours away from building and improving systems. A healthy postmortem culture should focus on blameless learning from failure, not on tedious paperwork [5]. Rootly solves this by automating the entire postmortem lifecycle, from data collection and report generation to action item tracking.

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

The difference lies in automation, data integrity, and consistency. While manual documentation is a fragmented and labor-intensive task, Rootly provides a streamlined, data-rich experience that ensures no detail is overlooked. This allows engineers to focus on analysis rather than assembly.

The Old Way: Burdensome Manual Docs

The manual postmortem process is a familiar bottleneck. Engineers spend hours trying to reconstruct an incident timeline by piecing together data from scattered sources like Slack threads, Jira tickets, and monitoring dashboards. This approach is plagued by several pain points:

• Data is easily missed: Critical context from a key conversation or a fleeting metric spike can be overlooked, leading to an incomplete analysis.
• Reports are inconsistent: Without a standard format, reports vary across teams, making it nearly impossible to compare incidents and identify systemic trends.
• Action items get lost: Follow-up tasks listed in static documents are often forgotten, meaning valuable lessons fail to translate into meaningful improvements.

This manual toil is a major reason why teams either rush through postmortems or skip them entirely. The process itself becomes a barrier to learning, a common challenge many organizations face when trying to implement effective postmortem practices [7].

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

Rootly transforms postmortems by automatically centralizing all incident-related information into a single source of truth. As an incident unfolds, the platform captures a complete, immutable timeline that includes every command run, Slack message sent, alert fired, and role change made. This automation eliminates the need for manual data gathering, ensuring every postmortem is built on an accurate and comprehensive foundation. With this solid base, your team can build a lightning-fast response system that connects the initial alert to the final resolution and learning phase.

How Can Rootly Automatically Generate Postmortem Reports?

Rootly removes the friction of report writing by turning a multi-hour task into a one-click action. It leverages the rich data captured during the incident to build a comprehensive narrative instantly, providing a powerful first draft for your team to analyze and refine.

One-Click Report Generation from a Single Source of Truth

Once an incident is resolved in Rootly, you can generate a full postmortem report with a single click. The platform automatically pulls in all relevant data, including:

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

This automation ensures you're always working with a complete dataset, perfectly populating an effective postmortem template without any manual copy-pasting [8].

Customizable Templates to Fit Your Organization's Needs

While automation provides the data, your team provides the insights. Rootly ensures your process supports this by offering fully customizable postmortem templates. You can create and adapt templates with custom questions, required fields, and unique formatting to align with your company's specific learning objectives. This flexibility is key; it ensures that while the process is standardized, it doesn't become rigid. It helps you optimize your incident response cadence by avoiding processes that hinder rather than help.

How Does Rootly Automate Action Item Tracking from Postmortems?

A postmortem's value is measured by the improvements it inspires. Rootly ensures that lessons learned translate into concrete actions by automating the creation and tracking of follow-up tasks, embedding accountability directly into your workflow.

Create and Assign Action Items Directly from the Postmortem

Forget about listing action items in a static document where they are easily overlooked. Weak internal controls and poor follow-up are major sources of risk; one review of credit union failures found that 15 out of 16 cases involved ineffective management and oversight [4]. Rootly addresses this by allowing your team to create actionable follow-up tasks directly within the postmortem interface. These items can be immediately assigned to specific individuals or teams, establishing clear ownership from the start.

Seamless Integration with Jira, Linear, and More

Rootly features powerful, two-way integrations with the project management tools your teams already use. Action items created in a Rootly postmortem can be automatically synced as tickets in Jira, Linear, Asana, and other platforms. This places follow-up tasks directly into engineering backlogs, dramatically increasing visibility and the likelihood of completion. The two-way sync means that when a developer updates a Jira ticket, the status is automatically reflected in Rootly. This level of integration allows workflows to automatically update information across platforms, creating a single, cohesive system for incident follow-up.

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

Incidents often impact the entire business. Rootly makes it simple to share learnings and updates with stakeholders across the organization, improving transparency and cross-functional alignment.

A Centralized, Searchable Knowledge Base

All Rootly postmortems are stored in a centralized and easily searchable repository. This creates an invaluable knowledge base for identifying systemic patterns, onboarding new engineers, and demonstrating compliance. It stands in stark contrast to manual documents stored in disparate folders on Google Drive or Confluence, which become difficult to track and analyze over time. A shared, accessible history of postmortems is a key asset for learning from past failures and preventing future issues [4].

Automated Sharing to Slack, Email, and More

Rootly can automatically share completed postmortem reports with relevant stakeholders through the channels they prefer. You can configure workflows to post a summary to a #security-updates Slack channel, email a high-level report to the leadership team, or push the full technical document to a Confluence space. This ensures non-technical teams like customer support, legal, and executives are kept informed without any manual effort. You can even target specific responders or teams by leveraging integrations that sync on-call schedules with Slack user groups, ensuring the right people get the right information every time.

Conclusion: Turn Postmortems from a Chore into a Catalyst for Improvement

By automating postmortems with Rootly, you save valuable engineering time, improve data accuracy, ensure action items are tracked to completion, and enhance cross-functional visibility. By eliminating the drudgery of manual documentation, Rootly empowers your teams to focus on what truly matters: learning from incidents to build more resilient and reliable systems.

Ready to see how Rootly can transform your entire incident management process? To improve visibility and capture more data from the moment an incident starts, book a demo with Rootly today.

‍