Incidents

An alert is what the engine detected. An incident is what you decide to tell people. They are separate on purpose: not every alert deserves a public incident, and an incident can exist for something no monitor saw.

Create an incident

Go to Alerting → Incidents and click New incident.
Enter a title — it is what your status page shows.
Pick a severity: Minor, Major, or Critical.
Select the affected monitor.
Click Create.

Creating an incident automatically posts a first Investigating update, so the timeline is never empty.

You can also start from an alert: open a row in the Alerts log, click Create an incident, and the title, severity and monitor arrive pre-filled with the alert linked to the incident.

Update an incident

While resolving an incident, post updates — each one is timestamped and shown on the public status page:

Investigating — You’re looking into the issue.
Identified — The cause has been found.
Monitoring — A fix is being deployed or is being watched for regression.
Resolved — The service is back to normal.

Resolve is a shortcut for a final Resolved update. Every update goes out to your status page’s email subscribers.

The Incidents page

The page has two tabs:

Incidents — what you declared, filterable by All / Active / Resolved. Each row expands to its timeline, where you add updates, resolve, or delete it.
Visitor reports — the problems your status page visitors flagged themselves (see Alerts from a status page), with a count badge for the unhandled ones. A report is a lead, not a confirmed outage: check the monitor, then declare an incident from it or dismiss it.

Deleting an incident removes it and its whole timeline, on the status page too — resolve it instead if it actually happened.

Severity and what the outside world sees

Severity	On the status page
Minor	Degraded performance
Major	Degraded performance
Critical	Major outage — the page’s aggregate badge turns red

For planned work, use a maintenance window instead: it suppresses alerts as well as informing visitors. For a lighter message with no timeline, a status page announcement is often enough.