Incident Tasks
Incident tasks are a lightweight checklist you can attach to any open incident. They help your team track what needs to be done, what’s been completed, and what’s still outstanding — without leaving the incident view.
Tasks vs. Runbooks
These are related but distinct features:
| Tasks | Runbooks | |
|---|---|---|
| Created | During a live incident | In advance (per page or component) |
| Purpose | Track real-time response steps | Pre-written operational playbooks |
| Scope | Specific to one incident | Reusable across incidents |
| When to use | Ad-hoc to-dos as the incident unfolds | Standard procedures for known failure modes |
In practice, runbooks often generate the tasks you track. A runbook for a database outage might say “Check replication lag” and “Notify the DBA on call” — those become tasks you tick off on the live incident.
Adding Tasks to an Incident
- Open the incident from your dashboard
- Scroll to the Tasks section
- Type a task description and press Add
- Check tasks off as you complete them
Tasks are visible to all team members with access to the incident.
Completing and Deleting Tasks
- Complete — click the checkbox next to a task to mark it done. Completed tasks move to a separate list and are timestamped.
- Delete — remove a task that is no longer relevant using the delete icon.
- Reopen — uncheck a completed task if it needs revisiting.
All task state changes are recorded in the incident’s activity log.
Task Limits by Plan
The maximum number of tasks per incident depends on your plan:
| Plan | Tasks per incident |
|---|---|
| Free | 5 |
| Starter | 50 |
| Team | 50 |
| Business | 200 |
| Enterprise | 200 |
| OSS Hero | 50 |
If you hit the limit, complete or delete existing tasks to add new ones.
Why Use Incident Tasks
During an incident:
- Keep the team aligned on who is doing what
- Avoid duplicate work — if “Restarted web servers” is already checked, no one does it twice
- Surface outstanding steps clearly so nothing falls through the cracks
After an incident:
- The completed task list feeds directly into your postmortem report — you have a timestamped record of every action taken
- Helps identify response patterns worth turning into runbooks
Related
- Runbooks — pre-built playbooks that auto-link to incidents
- Postmortem Reports — post-incident review using the incident timeline
- Automatic Incident Management — auto-create incidents when monitors go down