Claude: turn an incident description into a useful triage note

What you will make

A practical Claude guide to turn an incident description into a useful triage note. Use the sample input and prompt, then check the result. Use a fictional support-document review as the practice setting. Keep passages and your interpretation in separate output fields.

Prepare the source and scope

Collect observed symptoms, start time, affected users and recent changes. Sanitize hostnames, access tokens and personal data. Open Claude and start a focused conversation, or use the appropriate existing project for recurring work.

Try this prompt

In Claude, provide the prepared input, then send the following request. For real work, replace fictional details with approved facts.

Create a triage note from these observations. Separate confirmed facts, hypotheses and next questions. Suggest read-only checks first and do not claim a root cause.

Review the result

Each hypothesis should name the observation that would support or reject it; the impact should match the report. Record each correction and its supporting source.

If the answer is wrong or incomplete

Repeated symptoms do not establish causation. Keep a suspected update or network issue labeled as unconfirmed. Put the source excerpt and the request in separate labeled blocks. For longer reviews, retain paragraph labels so corrections remain traceable.

Practice and completion check

Repeat with one incomplete input. Check the answer against the review criteria, remove unsupported claims and save the prompt with its source version. This workflow has not been verified in a customer deployment.