One Postmortem for Several Incidents
Last updated: 2026-10-08
A single root cause often produces more than one incident: a database failover can trip your API monitor, your dashboard monitor, and a manually created “degraded performance” incident within the same half hour. Writing three near-identical postmortems is busywork, and readers have to piece the story together themselves.
A postmortem can now cover several incidents of the same status page. You write it once, and it becomes the single, authoritative write-up for all of them.
Adding Related Incidents
Open a resolved incident and choose Add Postmortem (or Edit Postmortem). The editor has a Related incidents section where you choose other incidents caused by the same underlying event.
- Covered by this postmortem lists everything the postmortem currently covers. The incident you started from is marked This incident and is always included. A postmortem must cover at least one incident.
- Suggested incidents lists resolved incidents that look related. Each suggestion shows a Possibly related badge and the reasons it was suggested. Press Add on the ones that belong.
- Find another incident lets you search your resolved incidents by title when a suggestion is missing. Use Load more for longer result lists.
Nothing is added unless you select it. Suggestions are only hints.
Why an incident is suggested
Suggestions come from one or more of these signals, shown next to each incident:
- Occurred during this outage
- Started within 5, 15 or 30 minutes of this incident
- Recovered within 5, 15 or 30 minutes of this incident
- Same monitor, same component, related component, or same region
What can be added
Only resolved, non-archived incidents of the same status page can be added. Incidents from other status pages never appear in the suggestions or in search.
Removing an Incident
You can remove an incident from a postmortem at any time before you save. Removing it:
- Only changes which incidents the postmortem covers.
- Never changes the incident itself: its status, updates and timeline stay exactly as they were.
The incident you started from cannot be removed, since the postmortem has to cover at least one incident.
What Visitors See
Once published, the postmortem has one public page on your status page. When it covers more than one incident, the page includes an Incidents covered by this postmortem section listing every incident, with its start and end time, duration, and a link to the incident page.
Each covered incident links to that same postmortem from its own page, so someone arriving on any one of them lands on the full story instead of a partial one.
A postmortem that covers a single incident looks and behaves as before.
Publishing
The existing publishing options apply to the whole postmortem:
- Save as a draft to keep it visible only to your team.
- Publish now to make it public immediately. Once published it cannot be unpublished, and later edits update the content while keeping the original publish date.
- Schedule Publish to choose a future date and time. You enter it in your local timezone, and the form shows the exact time it will publish.
Plan Availability
Postmortems, including multi-incident postmortems, follow the same plan rules as single-incident postmortems: Starter and above, including OSS Hero.