Creating postmortems

You can create a postmortem from a resolved incident or from scratch. This page covers both flows and explains the content sections that make a thorough postmortem.

Creating from an incident

The most common path is to create a postmortem directly from an incident that has been resolved:

1. Open the incident you want to analyze.
2. Click the Create Postmortem button in the top-right corner.
3. Batida pre-fills the postmortem with incident metadata: title, severity, duration, and timeline events.
4. Fill in the remaining sections (root cause, impact, action items).
5. Submit for review.

TIP

You can also use AI to auto-generate a draft. Click Generate with AI on the creation screen to populate all sections from incident data.

Creating from scratch

If you need to document an incident that was not tracked in Batida, create a standalone postmortem:

1. Navigate to Postmortems in the sidebar.
2. Click New Postmortem.
3. Fill in the title, date, and all content sections manually.

Content sections

Every postmortem in Batida includes the following sections:

Timeline

A chronological list of events from detection to resolution. Include exact timestamps when possible. When created from an incident, the timeline is auto-populated from the incident activity log.

Time (UTC)	Event
14:02	Alert triggered for API latency
14:05	Incident declared (SEV2)
14:18	Root cause identified
14:35	Fix deployed
14:40	Incident resolved

Root cause

A technical explanation of why the incident occurred. Be specific: name the system, the component, and the failure mode. Avoid vague statements like "a bug happened."

Impact

Describe who was affected and for how long. Include measurable metrics such as error rates, affected users, or revenue impact.

Action items

Concrete tasks that will prevent recurrence or improve detection. Each action item has an assignee and a due date. See Action items for details.

Review and publishing

After drafting the postmortem, submit it for review. Reviewers receive a notification and can approve or request changes. Once approved, the postmortem is published and linked to the original incident.