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Incident Report Templates

Incident reports are essential for engineering teams to document, analyze, and learn from production issues. A good incident report template standardizes how your team captures what happened, why it happened, and what you'll do to prevent it from happening again. Below you'll find free, copy-paste incident report templates in markdown — including a basic incident report template, a post-incident review, an incident log template, a sample incident report template for security events, and more. Each template follows industry best practices from Google SRE, PagerDuty, and Atlassian, and works with GitHub, Jira, Confluence, or any markdown-compatible tool.

Table of Contents

1. Basic Incident Report Template2. Post-Incident Review (Postmortem) Template3. Incident Log Template4. Security Incident Report Template5. Root Cause Analysis (5 Whys) Template6. Lightweight Incident Report Template7. What Is an Incident Report Template?8. How to Write an Incident Report9. Incident Severity Levels (P1-P4)10. Incident Report vs Incident Log11. Linking Incidents to Pull Requests12. FAQ

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Basic Incident Report Template

A quick-fill template for any type of incident. Covers all essential fields in a straightforward format.

Post-Incident Review (Postmortem) Template

A comprehensive blameless postmortem template inspired by PagerDuty and Google SRE best practices. Use this after an incident is resolved to conduct a thorough review.

Incident Log Template

A real-time, timeline-focused log for tracking events during an active incident. Use this as your running record while the incident is in progress.

Security Incident Report Template

A security-specific incident report with breach assessment, data exposure fields, and compliance notification requirements.

Root Cause Analysis (5 Whys) Template

A deep-dive root cause analysis template using the 5 Whys methodology. Best for incidents where the surface cause is known but the underlying root cause needs systematic investigation.

Lightweight Incident Report Template

A minimal incident report template designed for startups and small teams. Covers the essentials without overhead.

What Is an Incident Report Template?

An incident report template is a predefined document structure that helps engineering teams consistently record the details of a production incident. Instead of starting from scratch every time something breaks, a template gives your team a clear framework to capture what happened, when it happened, who was involved, what the impact was, and what you'll do to prevent it from recurring.

Standardized incident reports improve your team's response process in several ways: they reduce the cognitive overhead during stressful outages, ensure critical details aren't forgotten, and create a searchable archive of past incidents that makes pattern recognition easier. Over time, this archive becomes one of your most valuable engineering resources — a living record of how your systems fail and how your team learns.

Most engineering organizations use different templates for different purposes: an incident log for real-time tracking during the incident, an incident report or postmortem for the post-incident analysis, and sometimes a specialized template for security events or root cause analysis.

How to Write an Incident Report

Writing an effective incident report is a skill that improves with practice. Follow these steps to produce a thorough, actionable report:

  1. Document immediately.

    Start capturing details as soon as the incident is detected. Use an incident log template to record events in real time — memory fades quickly, and timestamps become unreliable after the fact.

  2. Classify the severity.

    Assign a severity level (P1 through P4) based on user impact, scope, and urgency. This determines the response cadence and who needs to be notified.

  3. Build a detailed timeline.

    Reconstruct the sequence of events from detection through resolution. Include timestamps, who took each action, and what the result was. Pull from monitoring tools, chat logs, and deploy histories.

  4. Identify the root cause.

    Go beyond the surface symptoms to find the underlying cause. Techniques like the 5 Whys can help you dig deeper. Be specific — "human error" is never a root cause.

  5. Define concrete action items.

    Every action item should have an owner, a due date, and a clear definition of done. Avoid vague actions like "improve monitoring" — instead write "add alert for error rate above 5% on checkout service."

  6. Share with the team.

    Circulate the report to all stakeholders. The goal is organizational learning, not blame. A blameless culture encourages honest reporting and leads to better prevention.

  7. Follow up on actions.

    Schedule a review 2-4 weeks after the incident to verify that all action items have been completed. Incomplete follow-through is the most common failure mode of incident management.

Incident Severity Levels (P1-P4)

A consistent severity classification helps your team prioritize response efforts and set expectations for stakeholders. Here is a common framework used by engineering organizations:

SeverityDefinitionExamplesResponse TimeCommunication
P1 — CriticalComplete outage or data loss affecting all usersSite down, data breach, payment processing failureImmediate (within 15 min)All-hands page, exec notification, status page update
P2 — MajorSignificant feature unavailable, workaround may existSearch broken, uploads failing, degraded performanceWithin 30 minutesOn-call team paged, status page update
P3 — MinorSmall number of users affected, limited impactSingle region degraded, non-critical feature brokenWithin 4 hoursTeam Slack notification
P4 — LowCosmetic issue or minor inconvenienceUI glitch, slow non-critical page, minor logging errorNext business dayTicket created, addressed in normal sprint

Incident Report vs Incident Log

Teams often confuse incident reports with incident logs, but they serve different purposes at different stages of the incident lifecycle:

Incident LogIncident Report (Postmortem)
WhenDuring the incidentAfter the incident is resolved
PurposeReal-time coordination and trackingPost-incident analysis and learning
AuthorScribe or incident commander (updates continuously)Incident owner (written after resolution)
ContentRunning timeline, status updates, decisions madeRoot cause, impact analysis, action items, lessons learned
ToneQuick, factual, shorthandDetailed, reflective, analytical

Best practice is to use both: start the incident log when the incident is declared, then use it as the primary input for writing the post-incident report. The Incident Log Template and Post-Incident Review Template above are designed to work together.

Linking Incidents to Pull Requests

A large proportion of production incidents trace back to code changes — a merged pull request that introduced a bug, a configuration update that wasn't tested, or a dependency upgrade with breaking changes. Connecting your incident reports to the specific PRs that caused them dramatically improves your ability to understand what went wrong and why.

When your team can quickly trace an incident to the exact pull request that triggered it, root cause analysis becomes faster and more accurate. Over time, this linkage also reveals patterns: which types of changes are riskiest, which services are most fragile, and where your code review process has gaps.

This is where PR visibility tools become critical. If your team uses Slack for incident coordination, getting real-time notifications about pull request activity — merges, reviews, CI status — means you can correlate deploys with incidents as they happen, not hours later during the postmortem. PullNotifier sends GitHub pull request notifications directly to Slack, giving your team instant visibility into code changes that may be causing production issues.

FAQ

How quickly should an incident report be completed?

Aim to complete the initial incident report within 24-48 hours of resolution for P1 and P2 incidents. For lower-severity incidents, within one week is acceptable. The sooner you write the report, the more accurate the details will be. Start with the incident log you maintained during the event and expand from there.

What's the difference between an incident log and an incident report?

An incident log is a real-time running record maintained during the incident — it captures timestamps, actions, and decisions as they happen. An incident report (or postmortem) is written after the incident is resolved and provides a more reflective analysis including root cause, impact assessment, and preventive action items. See the comparison section above for a detailed breakdown.

Should incident reports be blameless?

Yes. Blameless postmortems are a cornerstone of effective incident management. When people fear blame, they hide information and avoid reporting incidents — which makes your systems less safe, not more. Focus on systemic causes and process improvements rather than individual mistakes. The question should always be "how did our systems allow this to happen?" not "who caused this?"

What severity level is a P1 incident?

A P1 (Priority 1) incident is the most severe classification, indicating a critical issue with widespread user impact. This typically means a complete service outage, data loss, a security breach, or a failure in a revenue-critical system. P1 incidents require immediate response, all-hands mobilization, and executive communication. See the severity levels guide for the full P1-P4 framework.

Who should write the incident report?

The incident report is typically written by the incident owner or commander — the person who led the response. However, it should be a collaborative effort reviewed by everyone involved. The author compiles the timeline, analysis, and action items, then shares a draft for team feedback before finalizing. Some organizations rotate this responsibility to build the skill across the team.

Can I use these templates with GitHub, Jira, or Confluence?

Yes. All templates on this page are written in standard markdown, which is natively supported by GitHub Issues, GitHub Discussions, Jira (with markdown mode), Confluence, Notion, Linear, and most other project management tools. Simply click the "Copy" button on the Code tab of any template and paste it into your tool of choice.

Other Tools

Stacked PRs GuideCode Coverage GuideGit Commit Message GuideMerge Request vs Pull RequestIntegrate GitLab with Slack
See all tools →
PullNotifier — Pull request alerts directly on Slack
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