Incident Management

What Incidents Are

An incident communicates an outage or a degradation to the visitors of your status pages. Instead of leaving people guessing while a service is down, you tell them what is affected, how bad it is, and what you are doing about it. Incidents can be created manually by your team or opened automatically by a status page when a component's monitors go down, and each published update can notify your status-page subscribers by email. You manage them on the Incidents page.

Manual Incidents

Create an incident directly on a status page:

1. Open the status page and go to its Incidents tab, then click Report incident.
2. Give the incident a Title.
3. Pick the Impact: Minor, Major, or Critical.
4. Pick the Stage (see below).
5. Under Affected components & impact, mark each affected component as Downtime, Degraded, or Not affected.
6. Write a Message describing what visitors should know.
7. Tick Email subscribers about this if confirmed subscribers following an affected component should be emailed, then click Publish incident.

Then update the incident through its stages: Investigating, Identified, Monitoring, and Resolved. Each update can notify your status-page subscribers the same way, so people following the incident hear about progress without refreshing the page.

The Incidents page shows one status page at a time, with Active and History lists. From there you can click Declare incident, Post update, or Resolve, and add a Post-mortem note.

Automatic Incidents

A status page can also open incidents for you. This is opt-in per status page: turn on Auto-create incidents from monitor outages in the page settings.

• The incident opens when a component has a partial or major outage. A component that is only degraded does not open one.
• It escalates from minor to major when a partial outage becomes a full outage.
• It resolves automatically when the component recovers.
• Subscribers are emailed about auto-created incidents only if you also turn on Email subscribers about auto-created incidents.

Set Hide auto-incidents shorter than (seconds) to keep very short blips out of your public history and out of subscribers' inboxes. If you post an update on an auto-created incident yourself, it stops updating on its own and you resolve it manually.

Incident History and Permalinks

Resolved incidents stay on the status page's Previous incidents tab, giving visitors a track record of past issues. Each incident also has a permanent link you can share, which makes it a natural home for a postmortem: link it from a retro document, a support reply, or an SLA report.

Incidents vs Scheduled Maintenance

Incidents are for unplanned problems. For planned work, use scheduled maintenance instead, so a deliberate maintenance window does not look like an outage. Subscribers are notified by email for published incident updates and for scheduled maintenance.

For creating the page itself, its components, and subscribers, see Create a Public Status Page for Your Monitors. To alert your own team before visitors notice, configure alert channels on the underlying monitors. Learn more about Status Pages.