Documentation
Product docs
Handling an incident
Assess → Publish → Update → Resolve
Assess what customers are experiencing
Work out which service is affected and what customers are seeing before you write anything. A red monitor tells you something is wrong, not what to say.
- Confirm scope and start time
- Separate symptoms from suspected cause
- Choose the services customers recognise
Checkout API errors
- Customer impact
- Payments may fail
- Started
- 14:02 UTC
- Evidence
- 8.4% HTTP 5xx
Publish the first clear message
Say what is affected, what customers may see and what your team is doing next. Publish before you know the full cause.
- Use customer language
- Give the next update expectation
- Keep uncertain details out
Update the timeline as facts change
Add a new entry rather than editing the last one, so a reader can see what changed and when.
- Add a new timeline entry
- Correct earlier wording explicitly
- Notify only when the change matters
Checkout is degraded
- InvestigatingElevated errors confirmed · 14:06
- IdentifiedProvider configuration rollback · 14:18
Resolve, then prove recovery
Resolve the incident once the service has stayed up, not the moment a fix is deployed.
- Verify the service is stable
- Publish a concise resolution
- Confirm subscribers have been notified
All systems operational
Payment processing has recovered and remained stable.
Checkout API errors
- Customer impact
- Payments may fail
- Started
- 14:02 UTC
- Evidence
- 8.4% HTTP 5xx
Current walkthrough step: Assess what customers are experiencing
Guides for the person running a status page from the dashboard. Each one ends with how to check it worked.
Start here
Create the page, add the first monitor and open it as a customer would.
Monitor and respond
Monitors and incidents, plus the internal view and page analytics you read afterwards.
Publish your page
The page's languages, look and address, what visitors see when your site is down, and embedding its status elsewhere.
Notify people
Email, browser push and chat channels for subscribers, and Slack or WhatsApp for your own team.
Account and help
Team roles, the audit log, billing, and what to check when something is not working.