Postmortems
A postmortem is your team's write-up of an incident: what happened, why, and what changes as a result. Each incident has one postmortem, in Markdown. The postmortem is internal, so only your team sees it. To tell customers, publish a separate write-up on the status page incident.
Write a postmortem
- Open the incident.
- In the Postmortem panel, select Start postmortem. For a resolved incident, you can also select Write postmortem at the top.
- Optional: in an empty postmortem, select Insert template.
- Write the postmortem in Markdown.
- Select Save postmortem.
You can start the postmortem while the incident is still open, and add to it as you go. After you resolve the incident, the Postmortem panel asks you to write it while the facts are fresh.
The headings of the postmortem make the Outline next to the editor. Select a heading in the outline to go to it.
The template
Insert template fills in the facts that Spectate knows:
| Section | Content |
|---|---|
| Summary | Space for two or three sentences about what happened. |
| Impact | The severity, start, end and duration of the incident, and a line for the customers affected. |
| Timeline | The declaration and every incident update, with its time and status. |
| Root cause | Empty. |
| Contributing factors | Empty list. |
| Resolution | Empty. |
| Action items | An empty checklist. |
Mark the postmortem as final
Select Published in the Publishing panel, then select Save postmortem. Published marks the postmortem as final for your team. It does not make the postmortem public. Clear Published to make it a draft again.
Tell customers
Spectate never shows the internal postmortem on a status page. To tell customers what happened, write a public write-up on the status page incident:
- Open the status page incident that you published from the incident.
- In the Public write-up panel, select Start from postmortem.
- Edit the text for customers. Remove internal details.
- Select Published on the status page.
- Optional: select Email subscribers the write-up.
- Select Publish write-up.
Start from postmortem copies the postmortem text. Later changes to the postmortem do not change the write-up. Spectate emails subscribers about a write-up only once, when you first publish it. See status page incidents.
Who can write postmortems
Owners, managers, admins and members can write and save postmortems. When you delete an incident, Spectate deletes its postmortem too.
API and AI assistants
| Action | Public API | MCP tool |
|---|---|---|
| Read the postmortem | GET /v1/incidents/{incident}/postmortem | get_incident_postmortem |
| Save the postmortem | PUT /v1/incidents/{incident}/postmortem | save_incident_postmortem |
PUT takes content, the whole postmortem in Markdown, and an optional published boolean. The new content replaces the old content. If you leave out published, it keeps its value. See the incidents API and the MCP server.
Through the MCP server, an AI assistant can draft a postmortem from the incident timeline. For example, ask: "Draft a postmortem for yesterday's incident from its timeline and save it."