Employee Success Stories

Engineering generates Post-Incident Review for faster post-incident analysis

Engineering uses PagerDuty's native Post-Incident Reviews (PIRs) for major incident analysis leveraging PD Advance to draft context and polling PagerDuty to copy incident timeline data automatically

Phase 1

The Challenge

How They Were Working

Post-incident review documents were manually created, with event timelines and tickets manually added or linked to the review.

Before workflow diagram

Pain Points

Low Post-Incident Review Completion

PagerDuty was only completing post-incident reviews on 38% of incidents resulting in lower learnings from incidents.

Manual toil

Responders manually copy-pasted timeline events from PagerDuty incidents and Chat channels to build out a comprehensive timeline of events for post-incident analysis.

Increased time spent on post-incident reviews

Engineerings uses PagerDuty's native Post-Incident Reviews (PIRs) for major incident analysis leveraging PD Advance to draft context and polling PagerDuty to copy incident timeline data automatically

Phase 2

The Solution

What They Did

1

Implemented incident workflows to automatically create a post-incident review upon incident resolution and set completion deadlines. Integrated post-incident reviews with Chat and PagerDuty to automatically build a timeline of events for analysis.

2

Integrated post-incident reviews with ticketing tool to automatically link tickets to post-incident reviews

3

Enabled PagerDuty Advance to Scribe incident calls and auto-generate draft post incident reviews based on Scribe, Chat, and Incident context

Phase 3

The Results

How They Are Now Working

The Investigator uses the draft to guide their investigation and makes edits as needed.

  • Investigator clicks a “Generate with AI” button the incident review on the post-incident review to automatically draft a review based on incident updates and Scribe Agent context of chat and call.
  • PagerDuty automatically drafts a post incident review, timeline, and follow-up action items
After workflow diagram

Testimonials

On even a simple incident, I would have spent four hours gathering context for the post-incident review. With PD Post-Incident Reviews, it was: click the button and look back at it in 10 minutes. There is so much time in gathering and re-gathering that context in the aftermath of an incident.

— Engineer, PagerDuty

Wins

Improved Completion Rate

post-incident review completion increased from 38% to 100% on major incidents.

Time Saved

estimated 4,872 hours saved annually, equivalent to 2.4 FTEs without additional hiring.

PIR drafting time reduced 60-75%

investigators previously spent 4+ hours manually gathering incident context and up to 1.5 business days completing a full draft. With the built-in PIR automatically pulling in all data and PD Advance drafting the narrative, the same work now takes approximately 10 minutes to generate and around 3 hours to review and finalize.

Outcomes

Reduced manual work and increased time for innovation

less time assembling post-incident reviews means more time on feature development.

Lessons Learned & Tips

  • Create a group of champions who advocate for the post-incident review process and guide teams on how to complete post-incident reviews properly
  • Run reports to hold teams accountable to follow-up action items tracked in ticketing systems
  • Use the "Generate with AI" button in PD Advance to accelerate PIR drafting - treat the AI-generated draft as a starting point for deeper analysis, not a finished report. The PIR brings in the data; the investigator brings the insight.

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