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.

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

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

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

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

What’s Next?

• Use incident templates to save time
• Schedule maintenance windows
• Set up subscriber notifications