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.
Manual Incidents
Create an incident directly on a status page:
- Open the status page and go to its Incidents tab.
- Give the incident a title.
- Pick an impact level: minor, major, or critical.
- Select the affected components.
- Write a message describing what visitors should know, then publish.
Then update the incident through its lifecycle stages: investigating, identified, monitoring, and resolved. Each published update can notify your status-page subscribers, so people following the incident hear about progress without refreshing the page.
Automatic Incidents
A status page can also open incidents for you. This is opt-in per status page: when enabled, the page opens an incident automatically when a component's monitors go down.
- The incident opens when the component fails.
- It can escalate if the impact worsens.
- It resolves automatically when the monitors recover.
Very short blips can be hidden from history automatically, so a few seconds of flakiness does not clutter your incident record.
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.