A comprehensive blameless postmortem framework designed to transform system failures into actionable reliability improvements.
Install & Download
1. ClawHub CLI
The fastest way to install a skill directly from the registry.
npx clawhub@latest install retro
2. Manual Installation
Copy the skill folder to one of these locations
~/.openclaw/skills/ <project>/skills/ Priority: Workspace > Local > Bundled
3. Prompt Installation
Copy this prompt to OpenClaw to install it automatically.
Help me install retro using Clawhub. If Clawhub is not installed, install it first (npm i -g clawhub).
Prefer to download?
Get the raw skill files in a ZIP archive.
What is Retro AI Postmortem Workflow?
The Retro skill provides a structured, multi-stage methodology for conducting deep blameless postmortems after incidents, outages, or near-misses. Instead of focusing on individual mistakes, this addition to your Openclaw Skills library emphasizes systemic root causes and contributing factors, fostering a high-trust reliability culture.
By guiding teams through a rigorous six-stage process, the skill ensures that every incident results in evidence-backed causal chains and owned action items. It bridges the gap between raw technical logs and executive-level summaries, ensuring that lessons learned are documented, shared, and translated into tangible system hardened against future failures.
Retro AI Postmortem Workflow Use Cases
- Conducting post-incident reviews for SEV-1 outages or customer-visible service interruptions.
- Analyzing near-misses to document potential vulnerabilities before they cause data loss.
- Facilitating technical debriefs in organizations transitioning toward a blameless engineering culture.
- Drafting internal reliability reports and public-facing status page summaries after SLA breaches.
How Retro AI Postmortem Workflow Works
- Scope & Audience: Define the reading group and establish a blameless framing while redacting sensitive PII.
- Timeline & Impact: Construct a minute-by-minute UTC timeline covering detection, onset, mitigation, and resolution.
- Root Cause Analysis: Utilize tools like the Five Whys to distinguish the primary root cause from secondary contributing factors.
- Performance Review: Evaluate what worked (e.g., runbooks, clear comms) versus what failed (e.g., slow escalation, dashboard gaps).
- Action Item Generation: Create specific, dated tickets in your issue tracker categorized by prevention, detection, and recovery.
- Follow-up & Communication: Distribute the postmortem summary and schedule progress reviews for the 30/60 day mark.
Retro AI Postmortem Workflow Setup
To integrate this workflow into your Openclaw Skills environment, add the retro skill definition to your agent configuration:
# Example command to initialize the retro skill in your local workspace
openclaw install retro-workflow
Ensure your agent has access to your internal issue tracker API to automate the creation of action items in Stage 5.
Retro AI Postmortem Workflow Data Schema & Taxonomy
The skill organizes incident data into a structured taxonomy for long-term reliability tracking:
| Data Category | Key Fields | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Metadata | Incident Owner, Severity Level, Status | String |
| Timeline | Timestamp (UTC), Event Description, Source | List |
| Impact Metrics | Users Affected, Duration (min), SLA Impact | Number/Boolean |
| RCA | Root Cause, Contributing Factors, Evidence Links | Markdown |
| Actions | Ticket ID, Owner, Due Date, Category | Table |
Retro AI Postmortem Workflow Advanced Features
- Support for both internal-only technical deep dives and redacted customer-facing summaries.
- Automated categorization of action items into prevent, detect, recover, or process buckets.
- Integration with traces, metrics, and log appendices for high-fidelity engineering reviews.
- Built-in review checklists to ensure blameless tone and factual accuracy before final distribution.
SKILL.md
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