> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.traversal.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Post-mortems

> Generate a post-mortem from a Slack incident channel or the Traversal web app — automatically or on demand.

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.

## 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.

### Proactive

When Traversal is added to a Slack channel that matches a [channel join trigger](/using-traversal/slack#channel-join-triggers) — 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.

#### 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.

#### 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.

### 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.

<Tip>
  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`.
</Tip>

## 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.

## 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`.

<Note>
  Traversal's post-mortem is a draft, not a replacement for your post-incident review process.
</Note>