What is an incident?
An incident is an unplanned event that interrupts a service or lowers its quality, from a full outage to a slow checkout. It lasts until the service is back to normal.
In more detail
Incidents move through the same stages: detected (by monitoring or a customer), confirmed, investigated, fixed, and reviewed afterwards. Customers mostly care about two things during one: that you know, and when it will be fixed.
Status updates commonly use four states: investigating (we know something is wrong), identified (we know why), monitoring (a fix is in, we are watching) and resolved.
Worked example
10:02 checkout starts failing. 10:10 monitoring confirms it and alerts the owner. 10:15 an update on the status page: Investigating. 10:40 Identified: a payment plugin update. 10:55 the update is rolled back, Monitoring. 11:25 Resolved. The incident lasted 83 minutes; customers saw the first update 13 minutes in.
OwlHound's status page uses these same four states for the notes you post.
See also
Related terms: Downtime and Status page. Free tool: Is it down?. How OwlHound helps: Public status page. All terms: monitoring glossary.
Frequently asked questions
Is every outage an incident?
Yes, but not every incident is an outage: a slow site, a broken form or an expired certificate warning are incidents too.
What should an incident update say?
What is affected, what you are doing, and when the next update will come. Skip guesses about the cause until you know it.
What is a post-incident review?
A short write-up after the fix: what happened, how it was noticed, what was done, and what will stop it happening again. Blame-free reviews get more honest answers.
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