An incident represents a service disruption. Watchplane creates one automatically when a monitor fails, and closes it when the monitor recovers. You can also create incidents manually for issues your monitors don’t cover.
The incident lifecycle
When a monitor check fails, Watchplane:
- Creates an incident with a start time
- Sends notifications to your configured channels (email, Slack, webhooks, push)
- Marks the monitor as Down on your dashboard and status page
The incident stays open until the monitor recovers or someone resolves it manually.
Acknowledging an incident
Acknowledging an incident tells your team that someone is aware and actively working on it. It doesn’t stop alerts for new failures — it just signals ownership.
Click Acknowledge on the incident page, or use the Slack button if you have the Slack integration connected.
Resolving an incident
When the issue is fixed, click Resolve. If the underlying monitor is still failing, resolving the incident won’t stop new ones from being created.
For monitor-detected incidents, resolution usually happens automatically when the monitor starts passing checks again.
Incident comments
Add updates to the incident timeline as you investigate. Comments are visible to everyone on the team and appear on any public status page that includes the affected monitor.
Good comments to add:
- What you’ve found so far (“Database CPU spiking, investigating query load”)
- What actions you’re taking (“Rolled back deployment, monitoring”)
- When you expect resolution (“ETA 30 minutes”)
Manual incidents
Sometimes you know about an issue before your monitors detect it — a third-party API is slow, a deployment is in progress, or a partner reports a problem. Create a manual incident from the Incidents tab to keep your team and status page up to date.
Incident history
Every incident is stored permanently. Use the history to track your mean time to resolution (MTTR), identify recurring issues, and review your team’s response patterns.
Developers: Incidents can be created, acknowledged, and resolved via the API and CLI. See the API Reference or CLI commands.