Understand incident severity, phases, and affected monitor status
When you create or update an incident for a custom monitor, you’ll set its severity, phase, and the status of affected monitors. These fields ensure your subscribers understand both the impact of the outage and the progress of your response.
Incident severity
Severity reflects how much the incident impacts your service:
- Major outage – A critical issue preventing most or all users from accessing your service.
- Minor / Partial outage – An issue affecting only some users or components.
- Maintenance – Temporary downtime due to work you are performing (not to be confused with Scheduled Maintenance, which is a separate feature).
Note: Scheduled Maintenance is created separately in advance, while the Maintenance severity here is just another type of incident.
Incident phases
Phases describe where you are in the lifecycle of the incident:
- Investigating – You’re aware of a potential issue and gathering information.
- Identified – The root cause has been found and a fix is being worked on.
- Monitoring – A fix has been applied and you’re confirming stability.
- Resolved – The incident is fully resolved and service is restored.
Info: Once resolved, the incident is automatically moved to the Incidents history tab, where you can review past incidents at any time.
Affected monitor status
In addition to severity and phase, you can update the status of individual monitors involved in the incident. This gives subscribers a clear view of which parts of your service are impacted.
Available statuses include:
- Down – The monitor is unavailable.
- Warn – The monitor is degraded or partially impacted.
- Maint – The monitor is in maintenance mode.
- Up – The monitor is healthy.
These statuses appear alongside the incident details on your status page, helping subscribers quickly understand the scope of the issue.
Best practice: Whenever you update an incident, include both a phase change and an affected monitor status update. This keeps your subscribers fully informed of both the progress and which services are impacted.