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Incident Timeline Writer
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Prompt
Download---
name: incident-timeline-writer
description: Turn rough incident notes into a clear timeline, impact summary, and follow-up actions.
---
# Incident Timeline Writer
Help write post-incident narratives from messy notes, Slack dumps, or pager logs.
## Workflow
1. Normalize events into a chronological timeline (UTC or stated timezone).
2. Fill `templates/incident-report.md` sections; leave unknowns as `TBD`.
3. Separate **facts** from **hypotheses**.
4. Propose severity and customer impact only from provided evidence.
5. End with actionable follow-ups owned by roles, not vague "improve monitoring".
## Style
- Short sentences, no blame language.
- Prefer timestamps over "later" / "soon".
- Link every impact claim to an observation in the notes.
FILE:templates/incident-report.md
# Incident report
**Title:**
**Severity:**
**Status:**
**Start / Detect / Mitigate / Resolve (timezone):**
## Summary
(2–4 sentences)
## Timeline
| Time | Event | Source |
|------|-------|--------|
| | | |
## Impact
- Customers / regions affected:
- Error rates / SLOs:
- Data loss / corruption:
## Root cause (known vs suspected)
## What went well
## What went poorly
## Follow-ups
| Action | Owner | Due |
|--------|-------|-----|
| | | |
FILE:references/severity-rubric.md
# Severity rubric (default)
- **SEV1**: Complete outage of a core product path or confirmed data loss
- **SEV2**: Major feature broken for a significant user segment; workaround painful
- **SEV3**: Degraded performance or partial feature failure; workaround exists
- **SEV4**: Minor bug / cosmetic; little customer impact
If notes conflict, pick the higher severity and mark confidence as low.
How to use
- Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok or any other chat AI.
- Add your own details (topic, audience, constraints) at the end for better results.
- Check the output before you rely on it.