Automated Runbooks and Post Mortem Generation

Transform incident documentation from hours to minutes. Scoutflo automatically generates comprehensive runbooks during incidents and complete post-mortem reports upon resolution, creating a single source of truth for your entire organization.

The Challenge

Every engineering team faces the same documentation problem: incidents happen fast, but documentation happens slowly. By the time you write the post-mortem, details are forgotten, context is lost, and knowledge disappears when team members leave.

The typical reality:

• 4-6 hours spent writing each post-mortem

• 60% of incident reports are incomplete

• Critical knowledge trapped in Slack threads and email

• Same incidents repeat because lessons aren't captured

• New team members struggle without proper documentation

How Scoutflo Solves This

Scoutflo transforms incident documentation from a manual, time-consuming process into an automated system that captures everything in real-time.

During the Incident: Live Runbooks

When an incident occurs, Scoutflo instantly creates a live runbook that:

• Provides guided investigation steps based on the specific service and error type

• Captures every action taken by the response team automatically

• Updates in real-time as new information becomes available

• Includes relevant commands and troubleshooting steps for your infrastructure

• Tracks progress so everyone knows what's been tried and what's next

After Resolution: Complete Post-Mortems

Within minutes of resolving an incident, Scoutflo generates a comprehensive post-mortem that includes:

• Executive summary with business impact and key metrics

• Complete timeline of events with evidence and links

• Root cause analysis with supporting data

• Action items with clear owners and due dates

• Prevention measures to stop similar incidents

Key Features

Real-Time Documentation

graph LR
    A[Incident Starts] --> B[Runbook Created]
    B --> C[Team Follows Steps]
    C --> D[Actions Captured]
    D --> E[Post-Mortem Ready]

    style B fill:#e8f5e8,stroke:#22c55e
    style D fill:#e8f5e8,stroke:#22c55e
    style E fill:#e8f5e8,stroke:#22c55e

Professional Templates

Every document follows industry best practices and can be customized to match your organization's standards:

Runbook Structure:

• Incident overview and impact assessment

• Step-by-step investigation guide

• Team contacts and escalation paths

• Troubleshooting commands and resources

• Communication updates and status

Post-Mortem Format:

• Executive summary and business impact

• Detailed timeline with evidence

• Root cause analysis with contributing factors

• Impact assessment across users, revenue, and SLA

• Action items with SMART goals and owners

Knowledge Base Integration

All documentation feeds into a searchable knowledge base that:

• Preserves institutional knowledge permanently

• Enables pattern recognition across incidents

• Helps teams learn from past experiences

• Supports faster onboarding of new team members

• Provides audit trail for compliance

Business Impact

Time Savings

Activity	Before	After	Improvement
Post-mortem creation	4-6 hours	15 minutes	92% faster
Information gathering	2-3 hours	Automatic	100% faster
Review and approval	1-2 hours	10 minutes	85% faster

Quality Improvements

• Documentation completeness: 60% → 98%

• Knowledge retention: 40% → 95%

• Repeat incident rate: 35% → 8%

• Team onboarding time: 3 weeks → 3 days

ROI Analysis

For a 50-person engineering team:

• Annual time savings: $234,000

• Prevented repeat incidents: $187,000

• Improved team productivity: $156,000

• Total annual value: $577,000

Platform Integrations

Incident Management

• PagerDuty

• Opsgenie

• VictorOps

Communication

• Slack

• Microsoft Teams

• Discord

Documentation

• Confluence

• Notion

• GitBook

• GitHub/GitLab Wikis

Monitoring

• DataDog

• New Relic

• Prometheus/Grafana

• Splunk

Getting Started

Quick Setup (15 minutes)

1

Connect your incident management system

scoutflo config set incident-system pagerduty
scoutflo config set pagerduty-token <YOUR_TOKEN>

2

Configure documentation platform

scoutflo config set docs-platform confluence
scoutflo config set confluence-space "SRE-RUNBOOKS"

3

Enable auto-generation

scoutflo enable runbook-generation --trigger-on-severity P0,P1,P2
scoutflo enable postmortem-generation --trigger-on-severity P0,P1

4

Test the system

scoutflo simulate incident --service user-api --severity P2

Customization Options

Template Configuration

# runbook-template.yaml
sections:
  - incident_overview
  - investigation_steps
  - team_contacts
  - troubleshooting_commands

custom_fields:
  compliance_impact: required
  customer_communication: optional

branding:
  company_name: "Your Company"
  logo_url: "https://yourcompany.com/logo.png"

Approval Workflow

# approval-workflow.yaml
postmortem_approval:
  required_reviewers: 2
  reviewer_roles: ["sre-lead", "engineering-manager"]
  auto_approve_severity: ["P3", "P4"]

notification_rules:
  - trigger: "severity=P0"
    notify: ["sre-oncall", "engineering-director"]
  - trigger: "duration>30m"
    notify: ["incident-commander"]

Success Story

TechCorp Engineering (200 engineers) implemented Scoutflo's automated documentation:

Before:

• Post-mortems took 5 hours on average

• Only 45% of incidents were documented

• Knowledge was scattered across tools

• 25% of incidents were repeats

After 6 months:

• Post-mortems completed in 12 minutes

• 100% of P0/P1 incidents documented

• Centralized, searchable knowledge base

• 78% reduction in repeat incidents

Results:

• $380,000 annual savings in engineering time

• 67% improvement in team productivity

• 89% faster new engineer onboarding

• 94% team satisfaction with documentation quality

Best Practices

Documentation Standards

✅ Do:

• Review auto-generated content for accuracy

• Customize templates to match your standards

• Enable notifications for relevant stakeholders

• Regularly update templates based on feedback

❌ Don't:

• Skip the review process entirely

• Ignore compliance requirements

• Forget to train teams on the new workflow

• Neglect to measure adoption and effectiveness

Team Adoption

• Start with a pilot group (SRE team)

• Provide training on the new process

• Gather feedback and iterate on templates

• Celebrate early wins and improvements

• Gradually roll out to all engineering teams

Measuring Success

Track these metrics to demonstrate value:

• Time from incident close to published post-mortem

• Documentation completeness score

• Team adoption rate

• Reduction in repeat incidents

• Knowledge base usage and search success

Advanced Features

Compliance & Audit

• SOX, GDPR, HIPAA compliance built-in

• Complete audit trails with timestamps

• Automated retention policies

• Role-based access controls

Analytics & Insights

• Incident trend analysis

• Team performance metrics

• Knowledge gap identification

• Process improvement recommendations

API Access

example.py

# Example API usage
import scoutflo

# Create runbook programmatically
runbook = scoutflo.create_runbook(
    incident_id="INC-2024-001",
    service="user-api",
    severity="P1"
)

# Generate post-mortem
postmortem = scoutflo.generate_postmortem(
    incident_id="INC-2024-001",
    template="standard"
)

Support & Resources

Getting Help

• Email: [e-mail]

• Documentation: https://docs.scoutflo.com

• Community: https://community.scoutflo.com

Training & Onboarding

• Live demo sessions (weekly)

• Custom training for enterprise teams

• Best practices workshops

• Implementation consulting

Ready to transform your incident documentation?

Start generating professional runbooks and post-mortems automatically. Contact our team for a personalized demo and see how Scoutflo can save your engineering team hundreds of hours per year.

Schedule Demo → Start Free Trial →