Creating and Managing Incidents

When something goes wrong with your service, an incident helps you communicate with your users transparently. Here’s how to create and manage incidents effectively.

Tip for Simple Status Pages: If you manage a simple status page (no monitors), you can trigger incidents automatically from the Simple Status Page Dashboard — just set a component status and add a note. No need to open the Incidents page.

When to Create an Incident

Create an incident when:

• Your service is down or unavailable
• Performance is significantly degraded
• A feature isn’t working correctly
• You’re aware of an issue affecting users

Even if only some users are affected, it’s usually better to communicate proactively.

Creating a New Incident

1. Go to Incidents in the left menu
2. Click New Incident
3. Fill in the incident details
4. Click Create

Incident Fields

Incident Statuses

Each incident moves through different states:

Keep your status accurate - users rely on this information.

Adding Incident Updates

As you work on the issue, add updates:

1. Open the incident
2. Scroll to the Add Update section
3. Write what’s happening
4. Change the status if appropriate
5. Click Post Update

Updates appear in chronological order on your status page.

Good Update Examples

• “We’ve identified the issue as a database connection problem.”
• “A fix has been deployed. Monitoring for stability.”
• “Service is fully restored. We’ll continue monitoring.”

Choosing Affected Components

Component selection is optional when creating an incident:

Component-Specific Incidents

Select specific components that are impacted:

• This updates their status on your status page
• Users can see exactly what’s affected
• Components automatically return to normal when resolved
• If you use runbooks, the best matching runbook can be linked automatically when the incident is created
• If you use per-component subscriber notifications, these incident emails are only delivered to subscribers who selected the affected service entry, plus subscribers who stayed on All components

Status-Page-Wide Incidents

Leave the component field blank to create a general incident that affects your entire service:

• Use this for datacenter outages, network issues, or service-wide problems
• The incident appears at the top of your status page
• No specific component status is changed
• Subscriber notifications go to all page subscribers, including those who normally follow only a subset of components

See the component management guide if you need help naming or grouping services before linking them to incidents.

Teams and Component-Group Scope

If you manage a shared status page through Teams, your incident access can be narrowed by component group permissions.

• Owners and team Admins can create and manage incidents across the full status page.
• Editors with explicit group assignments only see components and component-linked incidents inside their assigned groups.
• If your editor access is scoped to groups, you cannot create a page-wide incident with no component selected. Choose a component you are allowed to manage, or ask an owner/admin to create the broader incident.
• Ungrouped components are not available to editors who already have explicit group assignments on that status page.

Incident Context Sidebar

After an incident is created, the incident details view includes an Incident Context section.

This can show:

• A linked runbook with response steps
• Impacted monitors for the affected component

Use this sidebar as your responder workspace while the public status message continues to live in the incident timeline.

If you have not set up runbooks yet, start with Using Runbooks for Incident Response.

Writing Good Incident Messages

Example Incident Message

“We’re experiencing issues with our API that may affect integrations. Our team is investigating and we expect to have more information within 30 minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

Resolving an Incident

When the issue is fixed:

1. Open the incident
2. Add a final update explaining the resolution
3. Change status to Resolved
4. Click Update

Resolved incidents move to your incident history but remain visible on your status page for the configured number of days.

Viewing Incident History

To see past incidents:

1. Go to Incidents in the left menu
2. All incidents are listed with their status
3. Click any incident to view details and updates

If you want to reduce noise on your status page, you can also archive resolved incidents (hide from incident lists while keeping the direct link accessible): /docs/Incidents+%26+Maintenances/incidents-archiving

What’s Next?

• Use incident templates to save time
• Use runbooks to keep response steps attached to incidents
• Set up on-call rotations to auto-assign new incidents
• Schedule maintenance windows
• Set up subscriber notifications
• Target subscriber delivery by component