The 5-Minute Incident Report Template Every On-Call Engineer Should Steal
Postmortems fail for one reason: they take too long to write. By the time you finish the formal doc, the context is gone and everyone has moved on.
The fix is a 5-minute incident report you fill in WHILE the incident is still happening. Here is the structure:
The 6 Fields
- What broke (one sentence, user impact first)
- When we knew (detection time — if nobody noticed for 2 hours, that is the real finding)
- Blast radius (users, revenue, data — pick a number)
- First wrong theory (write it down BEFORE debugging; you will be surprised how often it is right)
- The actual cause (no blame, just mechanism)
- The one automation (what would have prevented or caught this)
Why field 4 matters most
Most incident reviews skip the hypothesis log. Then the same wrong theory gets re-tested three incidents later by a different engineer. Five minutes of writing saves hours of rediscovery.
Steal the full kit
The template above is one page out of the Ops Starter Kit — the full incident report, an on-call handover template, and monitoring checklists used in real 24/7 operations:
- Ops Starter Kit — templates + runbooks
- Automation Starter Pack — scripts that automate the boring parts
- Ops Mega Bundle — everything, for teams that page humans at 3am
Part of a series on autonomous operations and on-call survival. Follow for more.
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