Create and manage incidents

Create and manage incidents

Custom monitors rely on incidents to communicate downtime or issues because they don’t check availability automatically. Instead, you manually create incidents when your system, product, or service is experiencing an outage or disruption.

This makes incidents essential for keeping your status page users informed about what’s happening with your own product (e.g., SaaS platform, e-commerce site, or mobile application).

Create an incident

1. From the left-hand menu, click Incidents.
2. Click + Add Incident.
3. Fill out the incident form:
   • Incident name – Short description of the issue (e.g., Checkout API not processing payments).
   • Severity – Choose the impact level: Major, Minor, or Maintenance.
   • Incident phase– Track progress with phases:
     • Investigating
     • Identified
     • Monitoring
     • Resolved
   • Details – Add context for your users (symptoms, scope, workaround, updates).
   • Start time – Set when the incident began (defaults to current time).
   • Affected monitors – Select one or more custom monitors and mark their status (e.g., Down).
   • Notify subscribers – Sends updates to your status page subscribers.
4. Click Publish incident to make it live on your status page.

Once published, the incident will appear in your Ongoing incidents tab. You’ll also see the incident indicator (tag with a count of ongoing incidents) in the left menu, and on your Status page.

Manage incidents

After creating an incident, you can:

• Add updates – Keep subscribers informed by adding progress updates as the issue evolves (e.g., “We identified the issue”).
• Change severity or phase – Update the incident’s current phase (Investigating → Identified → Monitoring → Resolved).
• Notify subscribers – Each update can trigger a notification to your subscribers.
• View incident history – See all past updates in a timeline view for transparency.

Remove an incident

When an incident is no longer relevant (for example, if it was opened by mistake), you can remove it:

• From the Incidents list, click the three-dot menu (⋮) next to the incident and select Remove Incident.

Note: Removing an incident deletes it permanently. If you just resolved an issue, update its phase to Resolved instead, so users can still see the full history.