Incident Templates

Why Templates Matter

During an active outage, every second counts. Your team is under pressure to diagnose the issue, implement a fix, and communicate with users — all at the same time. Writing a clear, professional incident message from scratch while under stress leads to delays, inconsistencies, or unclear communication.

Incident templates solve this by letting you pre-write messages for your most common failure scenarios. When an outage occurs, a team member can apply a template with one click and have a fully formed incident ready to publish immediately. This approach offers several benefits:

• Speed: Go from detection to public communication in seconds instead of minutes.
• Consistency: Every incident follows the same communication standards, regardless of who is on call.
• Accuracy: Pre-written messages reduce the chance of errors or omissions during high-stress situations.
• Confidence: Junior team members or on-call engineers who may be less experienced with incident communication can respond effectively using approved templates.

Creating a Template

To create a new incident template:

• Navigate to Incident Templates in the sidebar.
• Click Create Template.
• Fill in the following fields:

Template Name

The internal name for this template. This is only visible to your team in the dashboard — it does not appear on the public status page. Use a descriptive name that makes it easy to find the right template quickly during an incident.

Examples: “Database Outage — Critical”, “API Degraded Performance”, “Payment Provider Down”.

Incident Title

The title that will appear on the public status page when this template is used. This should be a clear, customer-facing summary of the issue.

Examples: “Database Connectivity Issues”, “Elevated API Error Rates”, “Payment Processing Delays”.

Severity

Select the default severity for incidents created from this template:

• Minor — Small impact, non-critical features affected.
• Major — Significant impact, core functionality degraded.
• Critical — Service completely unavailable or data integrity at risk.

Message

The initial status update message that will be posted with the incident. Write this as if you are communicating directly to your users during the outage. Be factual, concise, and empathetic.

Example: “We are currently experiencing issues with our database infrastructure that may affect service availability. Our engineering team has been alerted and is actively investigating. We will provide updates as we learn more.”

Status Pages

Select which status page(s) incidents created from this template should be associated with. You can select one or more pages.

Components

Select which components should be marked as affected when this template is applied. When the incident is created, the selected components will have their status updated on the public page.

Targeted Subscriber Groups

Optionally select specific subscriber groups that should be notified when an incident is created from this template. If no groups are selected, all subscribers to the affected status page(s) are notified by default.

This is useful for scenarios where only a subset of your users is affected. For example, if the issue only impacts enterprise customers, you can target the “Enterprise Customers” subscriber group instead of notifying everyone.

Using a Template When Creating an Incident

Templates are applied during the incident creation process. Here is the workflow:

• Navigate to Active Incidents and click Create Incident.
• At the top of the creation form, click the Apply Template button.
• A dropdown or modal appears listing all available templates.
• Select the template that matches the current situation.
• The form fields are automatically populated with the template's values:
  • Incident title
  • Severity
  • Initial message
  • Status page(s)
  • Affected components
  • Targeted subscriber groups (if configured)
• Review and edit any fields as needed for the specific incident.
• Click Create Incident to publish.

Editing a Template

To update an existing template:

• Navigate to Incident Templates in the sidebar.
• Click on the template you want to edit.
• Modify any of the fields (name, title, severity, message, pages, components, subscriber groups).
• Click Save.

Changes to a template do not affect incidents that were previously created using that template. Templates only define defaults for future incidents.

Deleting a Template

To delete a template:

• Navigate to Incident Templates in the sidebar.
• Click on the template you want to delete.
• Click Delete Template and confirm when prompted.

Deleting a template does not affect any incidents that were previously created using it. The template is simply no longer available for future use.

Organizing Templates by Status Page

The Incident Templates list can be filtered by status page using the tabs at the top of the page. This makes it easy to find the right template when you have many templates across multiple status pages.

• Click a status page tab to show only templates associated with that page.
• Click All to show all templates across all status pages.

If a template is associated with multiple status pages, it appears under each relevant tab.