Incident Report Summary Prompt
Timeline, Root Cause, Impact, Next Steps — post-mortem summaries where the sequence stays chronological and the severity stays as written.
Overview
Incident summaries fail dangerously: a reordered timeline implies the wrong cause, an upgraded severity rewrites history. This setup summarizes incident reports into the four sections a post-mortem needs — Timeline (chronological, timestamps preserved), Root Cause (as stated, or "under investigation"), Impact (numbers as written), Next Steps — under Strict Fidelity with Preserve Critical Quotes, so impact figures and severity language keep their exact wording. The reading guidance pins the two rules that matter: keep events in order, and take severity from the report, not your judgment.
Workflow
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Summarize after the report stabilizes
Run it on the written report, not the live channel — the fidelity rules assume a source that holds still.
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Check the Root Cause honesty
"As stated — or 'under investigation' if unstated" — the section never speculates, which is exactly what a blameless review needs.
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Keep numbers verbatim
Affected-user counts and durations are critical quotes: preserved exactly, never rounded into a different incident.
Why This Works
- Chronology preservation stops the summary from implying a different causality
- "Under investigation" as a legal value keeps unknowns honest
- Strict fidelity plus critical quotes protects the numbers everyone will quote later
Best for
- Engineering teams running blameless post-mortems
- Incident channels that produce sprawling reports
- Summaries that feed status pages and exec updates
Not for
- Live incident triage — this summarizes the report, it doesn't respond to the incident
- Classifying incident severity — severity is extracted as stated, never assigned
Use cases
- Preparing post-mortem review summaries from long incident docs
- Keeping timelines chronological with timestamps intact
- Quoting impact numbers instead of approximating them