Timeline - Incident Postmortem.

Best for: Sharing an incident postmortem, incident reports to executives, explaining an outage to customers, quarterly reliability reviews

Use: Use it to write up one incident after the fact. It fits engineering postmortem meetings, incident reports to executives, explaining what happened to customers, and quarterly reliability reviews. Detect, respond and recover stand as a bar sized to their real minutes, so the phase that lost the most time shows first; each boundary carries its time and event so the sequence can be followed; and the root cause plus owned, dated follow-up actions sit below, so the slide also answers what will change.

Avoid: For plans or histories over weeks to years use timeline-roadmap, timeline-gantt or timeline-milestone. To look back at planned versus actual dates, timeline-plan-vs-actual fits better. It does not suit long incident narratives with more than five events or no clean three-phase split, or ongoing incident notices where the cause is not yet known.