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A proper post-incident review takes hours — reconstructing the timeline, writing up what happened, drafting follow-ups. Traversal produces a first draft so your team can skip the assembly work and focus on what actually drives improvement: reviewing, documenting, and shipping the fixes and process changes that make the org more resilient. Post-mortems can be generated from Slack or the Traversal web app.

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In Slack

For many teams, Slack is the primary place where incident response happens — so it’s a natural place to produce post-mortems. There are two ways to get one:
  • Proactively — Traversal generates and posts a post-mortem on its own once the incident resolves.
  • Manually — you ask for one by tagging Traversal in the channel.

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Proactive

When Traversal is added to a Slack channel that matches a channel join trigger — for example, any channel starting with inci- — it enters incident mode: it kicks off an investigation immediately and continues to follow along as the incident unfolds. No @Traversal mention required. When it detects the incident has been resolved, Traversal automatically generates and posts a post-mortem in the channel.

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How Traversal assembles it

Because Traversal investigated the incident in real time, it has two sources to draw from when the incident closes:
  1. Its initial investigation — the timeline, evidence, and hypothesized root cause Traversal produced at the start of the incident.
  2. The channel conversation — everything the team said, shared, and concluded in the channel: decisions, handoffs, fixes applied, and the final resolution.
Traversal reconciles the two and synthesizes a single narrative. It explicitly calls out where its initial analysis was correct, where it diverged from what the team ultimately found, and where it lacked visibility to make a call.

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What to expect

Proactive post-mortems include:
  • Summary — severity, duration, date, and a paragraph describing customer and system impact.
  • Timeline — a chronological sequence of alerts firing, log patterns emerging, user actions, and remediation steps, built from both the investigation and the channel.
  • 5 Whys root cause analysis — a layered walk from symptom to underlying cause.
  • Did Traversal get it right? — an honest reconciliation of Traversal’s initial analysis against the final root cause. This flags where Traversal was correct, where it was off, and where it couldn’t see enough to be sure.
  • Suggested alerts and tests — concrete, copy-pasteable alert conditions, log queries, or test ideas that would have caught this incident earlier, with rationale tied to the data seen during the incident.

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Manual

You can also request a post-mortem directly. Once an incident is resolved, tag @Traversal in the channel and ask:
@Traversal can you write a post-mortem for this incident?
Traversal scans the channel — pulling in the timeline, key decisions, relevant alerts, and investigation findings — and posts a structured post-mortem directly in the channel.
Traversal reads the full channel either way, so a plain @Traversal write a post-mortem is enough. If you want to steer the output, add context — e.g., @Traversal write a post-mortem focusing on the database layer — the root cause was a connection pool exhaustion.

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In the web app

You can generate a post-mortem from the Traversal web app by providing context on the incident — either a description, a link to the Slack channel, or both:
Write a post-mortem for the checkout service outage on April 14 starting at 14:32 UTC. Here's the thread: [link]
Traversal pulls from the thread, its own investigation findings, and any other context you provide to produce a complete post-mortem.

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Following up

The post-mortem Traversal posts is a starting point, not a final answer. Traversal is a chat product — you can keep the conversation going in the same Slack thread or in the web app to refine the draft, clarify details, or kick off new analysis. A few things you might ask for:
  • Rewrite a section — make the summary more concise or expand the timeline with anything that happened before 10:15 UTC.
  • Clarify reasoning — why do you think the DB was the bottleneck and not the upstream service?
  • Go deeper — run a new investigation on the database connection pool during this window or what else was deployed that day?
  • Draft follow-ups — turn the suggested alerts into a list of Jira tickets or write up the action items for the next review meeting.
Traversal’s post-mortem is a draft, not a replacement for your post-incident review process.