Incident Management

Guide to creating, managing, and automating incidents on Checkly status pages including subscriber notifications and incident backfilling capabilities.

Incidents are used to communicate downtime on one or more services. You can open incidents manually as part of your incident management process, or automatically by connecting a check to a service using incident automation.

When an incident is posted, a notification will be sent to all users subscribed to the Status Page, unless you opt out of notifications when creating the incident update.

Creating an incident

Create an incident when you want to communicate downtime or known issues of your services to users via your Status Page.

1. Click ‘Status pages’ in the sidebar and open your Status Page.
2. Click ‘Add incident’ at the top right, or click the fire icon at the bottom of the card that most relates to the incident you’re about to create
3. Enter the name of the incident
4. Choose the severity of the incident
5. Select which services are impacted in the dropdown list.

Note that incidents will be posted on all status pages where a service is present. See Services for more details.

6. Write the initial incident update message, and update the status of the incident.
7. If you want to backfill the incident, select Use custom date. See Backfilling incidents for more information.
8. Select if you want to notify subscribers of your Status Page about the incident.
9. Click ‘Create incident’

Your incident will now appear on all status pages that show the selected service(s). If you selected the option to notify subscribers, they will receive the update message by email.

All times on status pages are displayed in UTC.

Updating an incident

To update an ongoing incident go to the ‘Incidents’ tab on your Status Page and select the incident to update.

From there, you can:

• Post a new status update for the incident
• Edit existing updates
• Change the impacted services
• Change the incident severity
• Delete the incident entirely

Incident notifications

Whenever you post an incident update, Checkly can automatically send email notifications to users subscribed to your Status Page.

Emails are sent out only when an update is first posted. Notifications are not sent again if the incident update is edited.

If you want to post an incident update without notifying your subscribers you can uncheck the ‘Notifications’ checkbox when updating the incident.

Incident notifications contain information about the incident name, the severity and status as well as which services are impacted.

Subscribing to incident notifications

Subscribing to incident notifications is done on your Status Page. To subscribe, a user needs to enter a valid email address. A verification email will be sent to the registered email, and the user will be ready to receive incident notifications after confirming the subscription.

Incident automation

Incident automation opens incidents automatically whenever a check fails. It works by connecting a check to a service. Multiple checks can be connected to the same service through incident automation. After connecting:

• When the check fails and triggers an alert, it will also open an incident on the connected service.
• The incident will be automatically resolved when the check recovers.

Incident automation is available on Communicate Team and Enterprise plans. View pricing

1. Open your check from the home dashboard.
2. Click ‘Edit’ in the check overview page.
3. For API checks, URL monitors and TCP monitors, click the ‘Incident triggers’ tab. For Browser and Multistep checks, first click ‘Settings’ then ‘Incident automation’.
4. Check the ‘Enable incident automation’ checkbox.
5. Fill in the incident name, a first status update and the severity of the incident which will be created upon the check failing.
6. Select which service the incident should be opened on.
7. Select if the Status Page subscribers should be notified when the incident updates are automatically posted.
8. Save your check.

Backfilling an incident

Backfilling allows you to add incidents for downtime that happened in the past. Use backfilling to provide accurate uptime information to your users.

To backfill an incident, follow the steps 1 - 7 in the Creating an incident process. Next, select ‘Use custom date to backfill incident’ and pick the date and time when the incident started.

We recommend to uncheck notifications when backfilling incidents to avoid notifying customers about resolved incidents.

If you only want to provide the history of the incident, you can set the first incident update to resolved. This will correctly show the incident as having occurred, but without a duration. If you want to have correct uptime on your service you should post two incident updates, with the timestamps for when the incident started and resolved respectively.